Dans deux communiqués en date du 13 janvier, l"Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) présente les décisions de la Commission des sanctions à l"égard des sociétés Européenne de Gestion Privée (EGP) et Fininfor & Associés Multigestion.Ainsi, le 23 octobre 2008, EGP s"est vu infliger un avertissement et une sanction pécuniaire de 100.000 euros. «Les premiers griefs retenus sont relatifs aux obligations de la société EGP dans ses relations avec sa clientèle non professionnelle. (?) il ressortait du contrôle par sondage opéré par les services de l"AMF, dont l"exactitude n"était pas contestée, que de très nombreux dossiers ne comportaient ni fiche relative à l"évaluation de la compétence professionnelle du client ni convention de services», indique l"AMF. D"autres carences ont été observées. «Un autre grief retenu est relatif au contrôle des services d"investissement. La Commission des sanctions a estimé que les vérifications effectuées étaient insuffisantes. (?). Enfin, a été retenu le manquement relatif à l"obligation faite à la société de gestion d"être effectivement dirigée par deux personnes au moins. (?)». De son côté, le 2 octobre, Fininfor et Associés Multigestion a écopé d"un blâme et d"une sanction pécuniaire de 50.000 euros. «Le premier manquement retenu est tiré du non-respect par la société de l"exigence d"un niveau minimal de fonds propres et de l"insuffisance de ses moyens financiers. Les fonds propres de la société Fininfor, déficitaires au 31 décembre 2005, sont en effet restés négatifs jusqu"à la notification des griefs ; en dépit de plusieurs opérations de recapitalisation, cette société n"a donc pas disposé des moyens financiers adaptés à son activité», détaille l"AMF. «Ont également été retenus les manquements tirés de l"absence de contrôle des risques et du fait que l"AMF, qui avait subordonné son agrément à la présence d"un contrôleur des risques, n"a pas été avisée de la démission de ce dernier, intervenue en novembre 2006. (?)». «Il a été considéré que ne faisait pas obstacle au prononcé de sanctions la liquidation judiciaire de Fininfor, qui conserve la personnalité morale jusqu"à la clôture de la procédure ; il a toutefois été tenu compte de ces circonstances dans la détermination de ces sanctions». A noter que Fininfor a été repris par Swan en août dernier. L"AMF précise que ces décisions peuvent faire l"objet d"un recours.

Le ministre de l"Economie, Christine Lagarde, et l"ambassadeur des Etats-Unis en France, Craig Roberts Stapleton, ont signé le 13 janvier un avenant à la convention fiscale franco-américaine qui apporte des améliorations importantes à la convention du 31 août 1994 actuellement en vigueur. Le texte supprime la retenue à la source applicable aux redevances et, sous certaines conditions, aux dividendes intre-groupe. Il propose par ailleurs une simplification des modalités de taxation de nombreuses structures d"investissements : sociétés de personnes françaises et partnerships américains, fonds d"investissement et structures immobilières françaises de création récente (SIIC et SPPICAV). A noter également l"introduction d"une clause d"arbitrage obligatoire qui apporte une garantie juridique totale, aux entreprises comme aux particuliers, d"élimination effective de toute double imposition.L"avenant signé sera très prochainement soumis à la ratification du Parlement français et du Congrès américain. Son entrée en vigueur est prévue au 1er janvier de l"année de ratification. Le texte de l"avenant signé sera prochainement disponible sur le site internet www.impots.gouv.fr.

Selon Hedge Week, l’embauche de cinq spécialistes des devises chez Fortis (lire notre dépêche d’hier) correspond à la volonté de Henderson Global investors (HGI) de lancer prochainement un hedge fund «devises» destiné aux institutionnels, dès que l'équipe en question aura développé son modèle quantitatif.

Les actionnaires de Fortis cherchent à avoir un rôle direct dans la renégociation de la vente ur 14,5 milliards d"euros d"actifs à BNP Paribas, et prévoient d"attaquer en justice l"Etat néerlandais pour sa nationalisation du groupe aux Pays-Bas, selon un avocat qui les représente, Mischaël Modrikamen, interrogé par le Financial Times. Une plainte pour dommages et intérêts sera déposée la semaine prochaine.

On Tuesday, Citigroup announced that Morgan Stanley will pay it USD2.7bn in cash for its stake in Smith Barney, which was a joint venture. The deal will generate about USD10bn in pre-tax capital gains for Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal reports.According to sources close to the firm, Citigroup is planning to reduce its activities by about one third, by selling off its consumer credit divisions Primerica Financial Services and CitiFinancial, and its credit card operations. The group is also planning to reduce trading activities on behalf of the bank’s own capital. Citigroup, which declined to comment, is reported to be planning to concentrate on corporate and high net worth private clients.

Union Bancaire Privée had placed clients’ capital totalling several hundred million US dollars with Bernard Madoff, despite warnings to the clients from the bank’s own research team, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources close to the bank and internal emails. In early 2007, the research department at UBP expressed some concerns about Madoff’s activities. Later, it recommended that Madoff be removed from a list of fund managers approved for investments by clients. The directors of the bank were aware of the doubts and even dicussed them, the WSJ reports.

Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch (LODH) has been affected by the Madoff scandal, Le Temps has learned. ?A list of external funds of funds selected by the bank contains a total of six funds of funds. Three of them had allocated between 3% and 12% of their assets to Madoff,? the newspaper reports. They are the Gems Low Volatility, La Fayette Regular Growth, and NS DGC Pendulum.

GoldenTree Asset Management, a credit hedge fund, is offering investors who want to leave the fund shares instead of cash, the Financial Times reports. The offer has been met angrily by investors who in many cases lack the means to sell these instruments.

Fabio Galli, president of Assogestioni (the Italian association of management professionals) has commented to Il Sole - 24 Ore on the proposed new European UCITS directive. ?We can only welcome this directive, which aims to make the cross-border fund market more efficient, and which will facilitate the concentration of products as well as management firms. But for the moment, there are two problems: on the one hand, there will be technical delays before the directive is transposed into national law; on the other hand, as long as Italy has a different tax policy than other countries, the merger between analogous European products cannot be done.?

The Wall Street Journal reports that regulators in charge of the investigation of the presumed fraud of Bernard Madoff are looking increasingly closely at Robert Jaffe, a director of Chomad Securities, who helped the manager to recruit investors, since he has refused to testify. Cohmad is also a small brokerage firm in which Madoff owns a stake, and which operates out of the same office in which Madoff’s equities trading operations were based.

The management firm for Erste Bank and the Austrian savings banks, Erste Sparinvest, posted assets at the end of December of EUR23bn, compared with EUR30.8bn at the end of the previous year, and its market share has declined ?slightly? to 18.3%, from 18.47% one year earlier. Of this total, open-ended funds represented a total volume at the end of last year of EUR14.2bn, compared with EUR19bn, while institutional funds had EUR8.8bn, compared with EUR11.2bn. Erste Sparinvest’s market share in the open-ended funds market rose 2.1 points to 24.5%.

The German management firm Hauck & Aufhäuser Asset Management GmbH (HAAM GmbH) is entering the French market. It has obtained a license from the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) to sell its H&A Lux Equities Value Invest fund, a European equities fund managed with a value approach by Nils Bartram and Gerold Granzeueur, in France.For its distribution, the management firm will rely on Investeam, a French third party marketing firm specialised in marketing funds in Europe and North America, with which it has signed an exclusive agreement. Institutional investors, IFAs and private clients will be targeted.Hauck & Aufhäuser Asset Management GmbH is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hauck & Aufhäuser Privatbankiers, which si one of the last German private banks in which a majority stake remains in private hands. The entity manages assets of EUR2.9bn, in the form of institutional mandates and funds under its own brand and funds outsourced to the management firm by third parties. It is specialised particularly in asset management and European bonds.The firm’s entry into the French market is a first move into the international sphere for the manager. The partnership with Investeam will allow it to enter France without investing too much, and is limited to a single fund for the moment, but may eventually be extended to include other products, such as bond funds.Investeam says this represents the first fruits of its campaign to develop its presence in Germany, where the firm is building its newly-founded activities. A structure is being created under the leadership of Jan Schulemann. In addition to exporting German management to other countries, the entity is also planning to import products from French or other international companies to Germany. Investeam is also present in Canada, and in France it recently introduced the Canadian management firm DundeeWealth, at the end of last year.

In the wake of the Madoff scandal, funds which regularly earn higher than average returns will be regarded with suspicion by investors, Ignites Europe predicts on 13 January. This will lead to increased controls. ?If you serve the public, you have to accept public control. Otherwise, events like the Madoff case will destroy confidence,? says Don Phillips, managing director of Morningstar, in an interview with the online news source.

Hedge Week reports that the recruitment of five currencies specialists from Fortis (see yesterday’s edition of Newsmanagers) reveals a desire on the part of Henderson Global Investors (HGI) to launch a currencies hedge fund aimed at institutional clients in the near future, once the team in question has developed a quantitative model.

Altedia Investment Consulting (AID) has announced that in fourth quarter, it added ten new sustainable and responsible investment (SRI) funds from 7 management firms to its AIC Research database. The new additions to the list of management firms analysed are Sparinvest, Germes, Invesco Ltd and Aberdeen Asset Management.The quarterly ratings committee at AIC will award ratings of ?aaa? or ?aa? to 59% of the SRI funds in the database, and an ?a? or ?b? rating to the remaining 41%.AIC maintains information and ratings for 300 SRI funds worldwide, available from 75 different management firms, and representing assets of EUR28bn. ?Best In Class? type funds represent 61% of the AIC Research sample. The remaining 39% consists of thematic funds (largely based on environmental themes) and solidaristic funds.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports that managers of most of the 12 open-ended real estate funds representing EUR34bn (about one third of the market) which suspended redemptions for three months at the end of October will have to announce by 28 January whether they will reopen or maintain the freeze for a further nine months. Only KanAm has made an announcement so far; the firm says it will wait until January 15 for the results of a survey of projections from 5,000 distributors of expected subscription and redemption levels. Meanwhile, the Munich-based management firm has ordered an update to estimates of the total value of the portfolio of the grundinvest-fonds as of 25 January. The net liquidity ratio for the grundinvest is 7%, or EUR320m; the usual minimum is 5%.

Erste Sparinvest announced on Tuesday that it will be launching a wealth management fund on 2 March, entitled Espa Portfolio Target 7, which will aim to preserve capital invested in it. The fund will limit the risk of loss to 10%, and will aim for a performance over 7 years of about 8% per year. It is an Austrian-registered diversified discretionary fund, which may invest up to 80% in equities, but for which the allocation to equities may also be reduced to 0% if necessary. The ?absolute performance? type fund is an addition to other products in the range whose assets currently total about EUR400m. The diversified funds of the Espa range bring total assets under management in this category to about EUR650m, of which EUR400m are in Espa Portfolio funds. Front-end fee is 3.5%, and management commission is a maximum of 1.2%.

On 12 January 2009, the asset management arm of Commerzbank, cominvest [cominvest Asset Management GmbH, cominvest Asset Management S.A. (Luxembourg), cominvest Vertriebs AG (formerly MK AG) and MK Luxinvest S.A] were transferred into the control of Allianz Global Investors (AGI) Deutschland GmbH. The new group weighs more than EUR300bn in assets, which makes it the new number one presence in the German market.Oliver Clasen, a board member at AGI KAG, will retain his position and will join the board of cominvest Asset Management as head of institutional clients. Wolfgang Pütz, a member of the board of directors at AGI Deutschland, will also retain his functions, and will join the board of cominvest Asset Management to oversee and develop measures to facilitate the merger. Matthias Glas, a member of the board at cominvest Asset Management, will join the board at AGI KAG, where he will be director of distribution via banks and financial intermediaries.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp, a federal agency which ensures private pensions, has identified itself as a creditor in the liquidation of Bernard Madoff’s company, the Wall Street Journal reports. The announcement raises the prospect that the agency is preparing to handle bankruptcies of companies in the wake of the Madoff fraud.

Il Sole - 24 Ore reports that Alessandro Profumo, deputy director of UniCredit, travelled to Abu Dhabi last week, where he met with representatives of the sovereign fund Aabar Investment Company, the investment arm of the royal family. The visit is probably related to the Italian bank’s need to rebuild a stable core of institutional investors, the Italian newspaper comments.

Asset management firms are expected to publish very poor results for fourth quarter, due to the falling value of assets, redemptions, and falling margins, according to analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal. Outlooks for 2009 are equally bleak. Matt Snowling, an analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey, says managers who are expected to announce the largest annual declines in their operating profits are those who historically have had the largest operational leverage: T. Rowe Price Group, Franklin Resources Inc. and Janus Group.

Massachusetts regulators have filed a suit against the management of the money market fund Reserve Primary Fund, accusing the fund of lying to investors to avoid massive outflows, the Wall Street Journal reports. They also accuse the fund of favouring some important clients of the fund.

According to Bridgepoint, the value of transactions involving private equity firms in Europe plunged last year by 61% to EUR73bn, and the number of operations fell 30% to 572, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. The decline has affected all the major countries on the European continent, excepting Italy. In Germany, Bridgepoint counted 85 operations, compared with 112 the previous year, with a total value of EUR11.5bn (-62%).

At the end of 2008, for the first time, BBVA Gestión has overtaken Santander Asset Management in total assets in investment funds: it has EUR33.196bn, compared with EUR32.947 for its competitor, Cinco Días reports. Santander AM saw a 36% fall in its assets under management last year, while assets at BBVA Gestión were down by only 18%, in an environment in which assets in the sector were down 29.77%, and net redemptions totalled EUR57.646bn, the worst results ever observed. At Santander AM, representatives admit that priority was given to maintaining capital in deposits, rather than to marketing funds, and most of the money leaving funds remained within the group. In addition, Santander AM has a larger proportion of its assets under management in equities funds, which have suffered more than competitors which are largely oriented to other asset classes.

The first lawsuit related to the Madoff scandal has been filed against UBS, AGEFI Switzerland reports. It may be the first in a long series of suits. Oddo Asset Management has filed a claim in the Luxembourg courts against UBS to recuperate EUR30m invested in the LuxAlpha fund, which had ties to Bernard Madoff. The bank’s defence seems to contradict the prospectus of the LuxAlpha fund. The Luxembourg courts will respond tomorrow.

Luxembourg hit back on Tuesday at French suggestions that the Grand Duchy"s more flexible interpretation of European Union financial regulations had contributed to investors» losses in the Madoff scandal. Luc Frieden, treasury and justice minister, told the Financial Times that the French government had made the claims ?without properly informing itself?. He added that he saw no pressing need to reinforce Europe-wide protection for investors in investment funds, although Luxembourg would support such an initiative if the need were clearly demonstrated.

The European convertible bond market is expected to contract for the second consecutive year, as the value of bonds redeemed exceeds those of new issues by about 50%, according to Barclays Capital, cited by the Wall Street Journal. Analysts predict that about EUR8bn will be raised through new issues in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, while redemptions may total about EUR12bn.

Le Handelsblatt rapporte que, selon les milieux financiers, la Deutsche Bank essaie d’obtenir un rabais sur le prix d’acquisition de la Postbank compte tenu du plongeon accusé par le titre depuis que les modalités de la cession par la Deutsche Post ont été conclues en septembre. Cependant, il n’y a pour l’instant aucun indice de rapprochement des positions entre l’acquéreur et le vendeur.

Selon une enquête de la Börsen-Zeitung, les sociétés de gestion allemandes ont l’intention de mettre en avant cette année les fonds garantis et d’autres produits conservateurs. Elles sont aussi tentées par les fonds d’obligations d’entreprises, mais reconnaissent qu’il faut s’attendre à une hausse du taux de défauts. Enfin, elles comptent être prudentes sur les produits actions.DWS (Deutsche Bank), DekaBank (caisses d'épargne) et Frankfurt Trust (Sal. Oppenheim) espèrent des souscriptions nettes en 2009. Union Investment (banques populaires) et Allianz Global Investors (qui va absorber Cominvest) ne font pas de pronostics.

Khadem al Qubaisi, managing director d’Abou Dhabi International Petroleum Investment Co. (IPIC), a annoncé que le portefeuille du fonds souverain va être porté dans les cinq prochaines années à 20 milliards de dollars contre 15 milliards actuellement, rapporte la Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. La politique d’investissement sera modifiée ; jusqu'à présent, les participations ne dépassent généralement pas 35 %, mais l’IPIC a l’intention d’augmenter sa participation dans l’autrichien ÖMV (à présent de 19 %) et de prendre des participations majoritaires dans des sociétés susceptibles de réaliser des projets permettant une diversification économique de l’Emirat.