Iran’s Man in New York: A Bob Rubin Protege Hunts for Investors

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks after returning from the annual United Nations General Assembly, in Tehran September 29, 2015. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi.

Iran, by its own admission, needs $150 billion of investment annually for many years ahead to repair the damage from a decade of isolation. That’s a tall order for a country that, even when sanctions are finally lifted, will still be an opaque and scary place to most foreign investors.

Enter Hamid Biglari.

The 57-year-old Iranian-American -- a Cornell University- educated, ex-Citigroup banker who learned the trade under the tutelage of Robert Rubin and Sandy Weill-- may have no official role, but by all accounts he’s President Hassan Rouhani’s go-to guy in New York financial circles. Biglari brings together investors and Iranian power brokers, at conferences or private meetings, as he pushes to drum up interest in his homeland. He had left Iran as a student a couple years before the 1979 revolution and wouldn’t return, not even for a visit, until the reformist Rouhani’s election some three decades later. Yet in a sign of his expanding influence now in Tehran, Biglari receives invitations to address the central bank there. In conversations, Biglari quickly makes clear he is aware of the magnitude of the current challenge.