Cornfeld, Bernard

▪ 1996

      U.S. financier (b. Aug. 17, 1927, Istanbul, Turkey—d. Feb. 27, 1995, London, England), was the flamboyant jet-setting head of Investors Overseas Services (IOS) and its Fund of Funds, a Geneva-based international mutual-fund investment firm that was allegedly worth some $2.5 billion dollars until the company collapsed amid financial panic and allegations of fraud in 1970. Cornfeld was born in Turkey to a Romanian father and a Russian mother. The family moved to the U.S., where the young boy grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied psychology at Brooklyn College and social work at Columbia University, New York City, but he quit social work to become a mutual-fund salesman in Philadelphia. In 1955 he founded IOS in Paris and established an aggressive, highly trained sales force of American expatriates. The company skirted U.S. and European securities regulations and grew rapidly in the booming stock market of the 1960s, especially after Cornfeld moved the headquarters from Paris to Geneva (reportedly to avoid investigation by French authorities). The bubble burst in 1970 when the U.S. stock market fell; IOS and the Fund of Funds lost millions of dollars in investments. Cornfeld lost control of the company, which was taken over by the American financier Robert L. Vesco, who fled the U.S. in 1973 after being accused of having defrauded IOS of $224 million. Although Cornfeld spent 11 months in a Swiss jail on a different charge of fraud, he was later acquitted.

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