11
NEWSMAKERS
Bowie Poised to
Dethrone Adele on
Album Sales Charts
How often in ones lifetime does a hydrocarbon superpower reopen for business?
says Ganesh Betanabhatla, a Houston-based
private equity investor in oil and gas deals. As
an American, hes on a lonely quest to invest in
exploration and production opportunities in
Iran after sanctions are fully lifted, via plays
by some of the midsize American oil producers hes backed in the past. But just to talk to me
about Iran, he had to insist his firms name not
appear in this article. And as a big supporter
of Jeb Bush and as national vice chairman of
Maverick PAC, a fundraising group of wealthy
Republicans younger than 40, Betanabhatla, 30,
has endured taunts from GOP friends about his
Iran pursuit. This is a worthy cause, he says,
but to me it comes at a cost.
Betanabhatlas bigger problem, he says, is
that information on Irans vast hydrocarbon deposits is sketchy and scarce: No one
in the independent exploration and production world has set foot there in 36 years.
Hassanzadeh has helped Betanabhatla with
research, and her network has arranged meetings for him with Iranian officials in New
York and Europe.
Her circle of sources includes a pair of thirtysomething white-shoe lawyersamong them
Amir Ghavi at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in
New Yorkas well as the CEO of a giant commodities trader in Switzerland and the head
of development for one of Europes biggest oil
producers.
Hassanzadeh became fascinated with energy
while earning her bachelors degree in law
at Islamic Azad University in Tehran under
Hassan Sedigh, one of Irans leading oil and gas
attorneys. She also interned in his law office,
where she worked with executives at big oil companies from all over the world. The experience
eventually helped win her a scholarship from
Royal Dutch Shell to pursue a masters degree in
law at the University of Cambridge in England
in 2008 and 2009. People are really intrigued
by her, especially in the West, says Jonathan
Stern, Hassanzadehs dissertation adviser
and the founder and chairman of the Oxford
Institute for Energy Studies natural gas research program. A young Iranian woman with
great English skills, an academic background,
real-world experience, and a law degree isnt like
anything anyones ever seen before.
I needed to break that boundary, to get into
an arena where men have always been and continue to enforce their dominance
In terms of shock value, its not only that
Hassanzadeh is a woman in the largely male
world of oil and gas. Its what she says. To her
Iranian clientsCEOs her fathers age, desperate to nail down foreign partners after sanctions
are liftedHassanzadeh tells them theyre not
ready. Sure, well-connected Iranian companies
can take small stakes in oil exploration and development deals, cede operational control to
international oil companies, and sit back and
collect dividends if the projects pay off. But Iran
needs technology, know-how, and good jobs, and
such things dont come from these types of semicolonial relationships prevalent elsewhere in
the Middle East, she says.
Bloomberg Businessweek
Crossword
Dilbert
Facebooks COO
Gives $31 Million in
Stock to Charity
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has
donated $31 million in Facebook stock to
charity, days after her boss Mark
Zuckerberg pledged to give away 99% of
his company shares. Sandberg, 46,
donated 290,000 shares of Facebook stock
at a market value of roughly $31 million
to various charities, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission
document. The shares are now in the Sheryl Sandberg Philanthropy
Fund, a donor-advised fund. Much of the money will go to causes that
Sandberg has supported in the past. PTI
Netflix to Stop
Customers from
Bypassing Country
Restrictions
A Terrorist Killed
Her Husband,
and now shes
Suing Twitter
Most-Luminous,
16km Wide
Supernova
Discovered
A team of astronomers
has discovered the
most-luminous, 16km
wide supernova that is
200 times more
powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter
than our sun and 20 times brighter than all the stars in our Milky
Way combined. Called ASAS-SN-15lh, the newly found superluminous supernova, situated 3.8 billion light years away, was
discovered by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae
team (ASAS-SN), an international collaboration headquartered
at the Ohio State University. It uses a network of 14-cm
telescopes around the world to scan the visible sky every two
or three nights looking for very bright supernovae. Supernovae
are violent stellar explosions and some of the brightest objects
in the universe. Human records noting their existence date back
nearly 2,000 years. PTI
6383
by S Adams