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Claren Road Investors want their money back; Prepares to pull out $2B from the hedge fund

Thinking that Claren Road Asset Management has come to the end of the road, Investors are ready to pull half of their money out of the company, which is another blow for the Carlyle Group LP's firm.

Investors want almost $2 billion of their money out of Claren Road and back to their pockets, according to Carlyle Monday. The amount will be given back to the client by September 30. By the end of July, the firm have about $4.1 billion worth of funds. According to the firm's filing, its "carrying value" has fallen from $216 million on June 30 to possibly nothing or about $75 million. The firm will take a non-cash charge during the third quarter by about $100 million and $175 million in "high degree of judgement" and may still change.

This is an additional problem to the many controversies surrounding Carlyle's hedge-fund investments. Carlyle already split with Vermillion Asset Management LLC, after its flagship fund dropped to $50 million from $2 billion. Vermillion is a commodities-trading firm. It was hit by the collapse of the raw material markets.

According to reports, another issue the firm faces is how its Credit Master and Credit Opportunities Master have been bombarded by investments in financials energy and Greece. Credit Master may be up 1.7 percent and Credit Opportunity up by 1.85 percent, still both these funds are in negative territory in 2015. Credit master lost 5.6 percent while Credit Opportunities went down 6.2 percent.

With all these turmoil, Carlyle is planning to shut Claren Road, which had $8 billion funds during its peak. These issues come during the failed bet on the nationalised US mortgage firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which resulted to the first negative annual performance of the fund last year.

Claren Road chief operating officer Albert Marino and Carlyle spokesman Christopher W. Ulman both didn't comment on the issue.


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