Mansoor Ijaz

Who is Mansoor Ijaz?

Mansoor Ijaz is an American hedge-fund manager and venture capitalist. He is founder and chairman of Crescent Investment Management Ltd, a New York investment firm that operates a proprietary trading system, CARAT, developed by Ijaz in the late 1980s. Ijaz's venture investments include recent efforts to acquire a stake in Lotus F1, a Formula One team. He was for some time a media analyst, mostly in relation to Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and the role of Muslim-Americans in U.S. political life.

In the 1990s, Ijaz and his companies were significant contributors to Democratic Party institutions as well as the presidential candidacies of Bill Clinton. During that time, he acted as an unofficial channel for communications between the United States and foreign governments, notably of Sudan, India and Pakistan. During the first Clinton term, when the U.S. had severed official ties with Sudan, Ijaz opened informal communications links between Washington and Khartoum in an effort to gain access to Sudanese intelligence data on Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, who were operating from Sudan at the time.