The Long Position

In 1991, the Soviet Union was coming apart in real time, and most of Western finance was watching from a safe distance. George Rohr was already on the ground — not as an investor, but as a publisher. He had gone to Eastern Europe chasing a media opportunity. What he found instead was an entire economic region being unbolted and put up for sale. That trip is the hinge of the whole story. Rohr's interest in the region began as the result of a media-related opportunity he pursued in Eastern Europe in 1991; two years later, he and Moris Tabacinic founded NCH Capital, becoming among the earliest Western participants in the privatization programs then opening across the region's markets. Today NCH manages agribusiness, real estate, private equity and public securities portfolios, and has raised approximately $6 billion of capital since inception. It is a career that reads, in retrospect, like a single continuous thesis: go early, stay local, hold long. --- ## I. From Newsweek to the New Markets Rohr was born in Bogotá in 1954 to Sami and Charlotte Rohr, a family that had fled Berlin thirteen days after Kristallnacht and rebuilt in Colombia. He took an AB in Economics from Harvard College — where, in a detail that says something about the man's range, he served as President of the Harvard Lampoon during its centennial year in 1976 — followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School. His first job was at Newsweek. Before founding NCH, he started and built a medical publishing company and acquired two other information-services businesses, each of which he later sold to major North American media companies. This is the part of the résumé that most profiles skip, and it is the part that explains everything else. Publishing and information services are businesses about distribution, trust, and audience — about identifying an underserved readership and building the pipes to reach it. Rohr spent his formative commercial years learning to read a market that did not yet know it was a market. When he arrived in a region where whole industries were being repriced from zero, he was already fluent in the discipline of arriving before the crowd. --- ## II. The Investment Thesis: Operators, Not Allocators NCH's founding logic in 1993 was that Eastern Europe's privatization era demanded permanent presence rather than tourist capital. The firm launched one of the earliest Western-backed funds in the region and established operations on the ground from the outset. An OPIC-backed private equity vehicle followed in 1995; a Romania-focused opportunity fund in 1996; the first small agribusiness positions in 1998. Then came the move that redefined the firm. Beginning in 2005 and accelerating in 2006 in Ukraine, NCH identified the opportunity to purchase or lease subsistence-level and fallow farmland and convert it into large-scale agribusiness operations. Its first dedicated agribusiness fund raised $1.2 billion in 2007. The platform now operates under the AgroProsp