The world’s ten biggest hedge funds, including one based in Bermuda, made profits estimated at nearly $2 billion from the global food price spike that followed the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, according to a report.

Analysis of the profits of the top ten hedge funds for the first quarter of last year shows they are likely to have made about $1.9 billion from trading in two food commodities, grain and soya beans, in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the invasion, The Guardian newspaper reports.

The Lynx Bermuda D fund, run by Stockholm-headquartered Lynx Asset Management, is named as being among the top ten.

The findings, compiled by Unearthed, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit, and the non-profit journalism organisation Lighthouse Reports, have raised fresh questions over the role of hedge funds and other speculators in inflating food prices, as a global cost-of-living crisis continues to bite, The Guardian said.

Olivier De Schutter, co-chairman of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told the newspaper: “Hedge funds and financial speculators have made obscene profits by betting on hunger and exacerbating it. That cannot be right.

“At the start of the Ukraine war, financial investors piled into grains and commodities in large numbers, seeking to capitalise on uncertainty and rising food prices, and they hit the jackpot.”

He added: “The signs are they helped inflate a price bubble, putting upward pressure on food prices — that were not in proportion to agricultural market fundamentals, to the actual supply of food — and this has affected hunger levels of the world’s poorest people.”

The report said hedge funds closely guard the details of their investments, so it is not possible to say which funds did best from trading in food commodities.

To come up with their estimate of $1.9 billion in profits from the food price rise in the first quarter of 2022, Greenpeace and Lighthouse Reports examined the returns made by Société Générale’s SG Trend Index for that period, The Guardian said.

The top ten hedge funds were the Managed Futures Offshore fund, run by AQR Capital Management; the Managed Futures fund, run by AlphaSimplex Group; Diversified, run by Aspect Capital; BlueTrend run by Systematica Investments; Tactical Trend A, run by Graham Capital Management; Systematic Trend, run by ISAM; Lynx Bermuda D, run by Lynx Asset Management; Man AHL Alpha, run by Man Investments; DTP Enhanced Risk, run by Transtrend BV; Winton Trend, run by Winton Capital.

The Bermuda Monetary Authority’s list of authorised funds includes Lynx (Bermuda) Ltd, Lynx 1.5 (Bermuda) Ltd, Lynx Common (Bermuda) Ltd, and Lynx SEK (Bermuda) Ltd.