The president of George Soros’ $25 billion Open Society Foundations is stepping down in the latest change since the 93-year-old billionaire’s son took over the charity.
“I always intended to be a bridge between George Soros’s OSF and that of Alex Soros,” Mark Malloch-Brown said Monday in an email to OSF employees seen by Bloomberg News. “Now that Alex has fully taken over as chair and we have largely completed a restructuring of OSF it seemed the right time, after more than three years, to step down and let him put in place his own team.”
Malloch-Brown will be replaced by Binaifer Nowrojee, currently vice president of programs, on June 1. The board voted to appoint Nowrojee unanimously, Alex Soros wrote in an email to staff.
“I have known Mark my entire life, and his life has overlapped with Open Society and my father in many ventures,” Alex said. “I want to thank Mark for steering the Foundations through this difficult period.”
Alex, 38, who became chair in December 2022, was named official successor to the charity last June, bringing in mass layoffs and an operational overhaul that paused new donations for five months. (The nonprofit continued to issue existing grants during that period.)
“New granting will continue to proceed gradually as we implement the new model,” a spokesperson said in an email.
Malloch-Brown has been friends with George Soros since the early 1990s and been involved with OSF for over 15 years, according to the charity’s website. A former UN Deputy Secretary General and British diplomat, Malloch-Brown has also been a journalist and held a variety of roles with the United Nations, World Bank, Oxford University and the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.
Nowrojee previously served as Open Society’s East Africa foundation director and regional director for Asia Pacific. Prior to that, she was legal counsel at Human Rights Watch and a staff attorney at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
“Heading this remarkable institution, the world’s largest funder of human rights, at a time when justice and compassion are under siege, is by far the biggest, and best, challenge I have ever faced,” Nowrojee said.