Publicity-shy Giuliani backer in spotlight

He battled in the courts. At one point he hired an Albany lobbying firm and got New York State to change an obscure law to strengthen his position. When the dust had settled, Mr. Singer ended up getting $58 million for his Peruvian investment.

Groups advocating debt relief — and higher-profile people like Bono — criticize such transactions, maintaining that they force poor countries to divert money from social and economic programs in order to pay back investors. The International Monetary Fund, where a top official once labeled Mr. Singer’s firm a “vulture company,” issued a report recently saying that such funds present a “major challenge” to the success of debt-relief programs in poor countries.

Mr. Singer said that it was important for countries to comply with contracts. “We have never had a dispute with a sovereign which could not pay its debts,” he said. “Our few disputes have been with sovereigns who can pay but refuse.”

At the moment, Mr. Singer is engaged in a similar battle involving Congo over $100 million in deeply discounted Congolese debt bought by an Elliott subsidiary a decade ago. He has hired lawyers to find Congolese assets, and even detectives, who discovered, among other things, a copy of an $82,000 bill run up by the Congolese president at the New York Palace Hotel during a visit to the United Nations.

Self-described libertarian conservative
Mr. Singer describes himself as a libertarian conservative dating to the Barry Goldwater days. He is a trustee of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization that provided Mr. Giuliani with a number of policy ideas when he was mayor, and has served on several boards, including the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which advocates a close military alliance between the United States and Israel, and Commentary Magazine.

He donated $250,000 to the Club for Growth, a group that promotes free-market policies and tax cuts, and which has praised Mr. Giuliani this year.

Over the years, Mr. Singer has been a major donor to Republican causes. He gave $1.5 million to the Progress for America Voter Fund, an advocacy group set up in 2004 to advance the policies of the Bush administration. The group ran commercials during the 2004 presidential campaign in Midwestern battleground states featuring the smoky ruins of the World Trade Center, while portraying Senator John Kerry as weak on military budgets. Mr. Singer was also a donor to the Swift Vets and P.O.W.’s for Truth, which ran advertisements attacking Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam War record.

But what has attracted notice recently is Mr. Singer’s September donation of $175,000 to a group called Take Initiative America — California, a corporation that had been set up in Missouri the day before, and which then donated the money to a group called Californians for Equal Representation.

The California group wanted to change the way the state’s 55 electoral votes are apportioned, from winner-take-all, to one apportioning the votes according to Congressional district. Such a change could give Republicans as many as 20 more electoral votes, making it much easier for the party to win the White House.

Democrats filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that said it was “reasonable to believe that Mr. Singer was acting as Mr. Giuliani’s agent in funding the California electoral college initiative,” which they said would have made his contribution over the limit for a federal candidate.

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The Giuliani campaign said it had no knowledge of the effort. “As far as I am concerned, you can leave it the way it is,” Mr. Giuliani said in September. After the group Mr. Singer supported had spent its money and become inactive, a new group was created to push for the ballot proposal, aided by Anne Dunsmore, who recently resigned as the Giuliani campaign’s chief fund-raiser.

Mr. Singer, who said he supported the proposal because he believes in proportional voting in the Electoral College, said that he had no plans to contribute to the new committee pushing the initiative. “I have had no dealings with that committee and played no role in its formation,” he said.

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