Mansoor Ijaz

Mansoor Ijaz
Mansoor Ijaz in Monaco, 7 July 2007
Born	Musawer Mansoor Ijaz August 1961 Tallahassee, Florida
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	1979–1983 University of Virginia 1983–1985 M.I.T. 1983–1986 Harvard-MIT M.E.M.P.
Occupation	Hedge fund management Venture capitalist News analyst and opinion writer Freelance diplomacy
Parent(s)	Mujaddid A. Ijaz (1937–1992) Lubna Razia Ijaz (1936-2017)
Relatives	Faysal Sohail (first cousin)

Mansoor Ijaz (born August 1961) is a Pakistani-American venture financier and hedge-fund manager. He is founder and chairman of Crescent Investment Management Ltd, a New York and London-based investment firm that operates CARAT, a proprietary trading system developed by Ijaz in the late 1980s. He was born in Florida to Pakistani immigrant parents and raised in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. He was educated at the University of Virginia and earned his graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ijaz has run Crescent as a quantitative asset manager for the past 25 years, integrating venture capital investments into the company's activities during the past decade. His venture investments included unsuccessful efforts in 2013 to acquire a stake in Lotus F1, a Formula One team. He was for some time a media analyst focusing on Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the role of Muslim-Americans in U.S. political life. In the 1990s, Ijaz and his companies were contributors to Democratic Party institutions as well as the presidential candidacies of Bill Clinton. During that time, he acted as an unofficial channel for communications between the United States and foreign governments, notably of Sudan, India and Pakistan.

During the first Clinton term, when the U.S. had severed official ties with Sudan, Ijaz opened informal communications links between Washington and Khartoum in an effort to gain access to Sudanese intelligence data on Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, who were operating from Sudan at the time. Ijaz, who is of Pakistani descent, was involved in efforts to broker a ceasefire in Kashmir in 2000–2001. He was also involved in the Memogate controversy, in which former Pakistani envoy Husain Haqqani allegedly used Ijaz to deliver a memorandum to senior U.S. officials in order to thwart an attempted coup by the Pakistani military after bin Laden was killed.