UKLFI Charitable Trust hosted a webinar entitled "The Trojan Bourse" with Dan Harris, and chaired by Natasha Hausdorff on Thursday 8 September.
Dan Harris, a leading specialist in the financial markets, spoke about his new book, “The Trojan Bourse” which analyses how the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement seeks to influence divestment and exclusion of stocks from investment portfolios.
Harris likens this to the Greek myth of the Trojan Horse – where the Greeks besieging Troy built a wooden horse, hid soldiers inside it, and left it outside the city, as a gift for the Trojans. When it was wheeled into Troy, the Greek soldiers jumped out and sacked the city.
In Harris’s analogy, the securities markets are encircled by a wall of laws and financial regulations. The votive gift is information, but the information conceals within it a political agenda, that will wreak havoc if brought inside the citadel.
More about the speakers:
Dan Harris is a partner at Chancery Advisors. He has been advising leading financial institutions, supranational organisations, governments, NGOs, multinationals and asset management firms operating in the secondary securities and derivatives markets for over 25 years. He has been admitted to practise in the world’s key financial capitals: New York (non-practising), England and the Cayman Islands (non-practising). He is counsel to many of the world’s financial institutions, advising on their high-value trades with idiosyncratic risk. He advises on the application, opportunities and risks attached to BDS.
Natasha Hausdorff is a barrister at 6 Pump Court Chambers, and a frequent speaker on International Law. She has a law degree from Oxford University, qualified as a solicitor at Skadden, and subsequently gained an LLM from Tel Aviv University, focussing on public international law and the law of armed conflict. She clerked for Miriam Naor, President of Israel's Supreme Court, and was a Fellow at Columbia Law School's National Security Program. Natasha is legal director of UKLFI Charitable Trust.