The intervention of George Soros in the battle for Eircom will, it turns out, be one of the final international forays by the Hungarian-born financier who has exerted enormous influence over the world's financial markets.

Mr Soros, who is backing Sir Anthony O'Reilly's Valentia consortium in its bid for the Irish telephone company, has decided to quit and is looking for a successor, according to Saturday's New York Times.

He has hired a head-hunter to find a new chief investment officer "to take charge and replace me", Mr Soros said.

He is seeking someone to take "charge of the in-house portion of the equity portfolio, with a view that he could take control of the entire portfolio eventually".

Mr Soros's former top lieutenant, Mr Stanley Druckenmiller, left the group last year to set up his own fund. Mr Soros has taken a more active role in managing his group's funds since then, but now wants to focus on philanthropy. Born Dzjchdzhe Shorash in Budapest, where his family narrowly survived the Holocaust, Mr Soros moved to New York in 1956 and set up the hedge fund that eventually became so powerful that rumours of its activities were enough to move markets.

His most famous move, selling £10 billion sterling in 1992 (#16.27 billion), forced Britain to devalue the pound and earned a profit of over $1 billion (#1.18 billion) for Mr Soros, whose motto is: "I was born poor but I will not die poor".

He specialised in making huge bets on macro-economic trends and his sell-off of the Thai baht in 1997 was one of the factors which precipitated the financial crisis in east Asia.

During the 1990s Mr Soros turned increasingly to philanthropy and became the most important private donor to emerging East European countries, aimed at opening up closed societies and encouraging democratic principles. His Soros Foundation Network has offices in 28 countries.

Mr Soros's reputation for financial infallibility took a knock last year when his fund group fell 20 per cent in the first four months after making bad bets on the euro and Internet stocks.

He has reduced his activities since then and renamed his Quantum Fund the Quantum Endowment, with the goal of seeking more modest returns and less risk.

With $11 billion (#12.95 billion) in assets his management fund is still one of the largest in the world, though it is down 50 per cent from its peak in 1998.

Along with the Eircom bid, Mr Soros is currently lobbying the Russian government to restructure Gazprom, the natural gas conglomerate in which he has holdings.