In May, Swedish investors once again turned their backs on equity funds, though they had massively returned to them in April. Equity funds on sale in Sweden saw net outflows of SEK1.9bn last month, according to statistics from Fondbolagens Förening, the Swedish investment fund association. In April, funds posted net inflows of SEK9.3bn, following two months of net outflows. Since the beginning of the year, equity funds saw net outflows of SEK1bn. In May, funds on sale in Sweden show net inflows, due to subscriptions to other asset classes, particularly money market funds (SEK1.7bn), and bond funds (SEK1.3bn). As of the end of May, funds in Sweden represented assets of SEK1.971trn, of which SEK1.169trn were invested in equity funds.

Helios Investment Partners, a pan-African private equity group co-founded by a former TPG exécutive, has raised USD900m, the largest ever amount of money for a new private equity fund targeting Africa, according to the Financial Times. Helios sourced its funding from US university endowments, Asian sovereign wealth funds, large African corporate pension funds and European and American fund of funds as well as development finance institutions.

Luis Muñoz, who joined Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB) last month, will be in charge of distribution of structured products and multi-asset class solutions for Spain and Portugal. He most recently served as executive director for derivatives activity at Morgan Stanley in London.

Since the launch of the first physical gold ETF fund in 2003, funds of this type have attracted a total of USD70bn in assets which would otherwise have been invested in gold mines equity, the Wall Street Journal claims.According to the independent research institute MineFund, thirteen of the largest gold producers will distribute a total of USD2bn in dividends, in a bid to win back the interest of investors. Among the firms are Barrick Gold, Newmount Mining and Goldcorp. Newmont has even defined a dividend indexed to the price of gold, which would increase its dividend by USD0.20 for every USD100 rise in the price of the precious metal.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the World Bank have announced plans to offer a periodical range of green bonds from the World Bank, aimed at investors at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. The first World Bank green bonds, which offer environmentally-friendly solutions via an investment grade bond investment, were launched in second quarter 2011.

The US Federal Reserve does not appear to be in a hurry to enter a new phase of quantitative easing, at a time when the European Central Bank has implied that it may raise its rates in July, so that investors rolled their portfolios over into bonds in the first days of June. According to the most recent estimates by EPFR Grlobal, bond funds attracted a net total of USD5.98bn in the week to 8 June. Money market funds, for their part, have posted net inflows of over USD26bn, while equity funds saw outfllows of USD7.74bn. Funds dedicated to US equities, in particular, have posted their heaviest outflows since mid-August 2010. Inflows to European equities remained positive, with inflows of USD236m in the week to 8 June. However, institutional engagements have gone mostly to German equities in 2011. Now counting flows which have totalled over USD6bn since the beginning of the year, European equity funds have seen outflows of over USD1.5bn. Diversified funds posted net inflows of USD219m, which brings inflows since the beginning of the year to over USD15.3bn.

The former Gartmore multi-managers Ari Towli and Nick Roberts have joined the multi-management boutique North Investments Partners, Investment Week reports. The two will work with Nick Stanhope on the range of multi-management products, whose assets under management as of 31 May totalled GBP450m. Both of them will report to the chief executive of North IP, John Husselbee.

After eleven years at Gartmore, where he was most recently head of intermediary sales, Warren Shiels was recruited by Man Group on 6 June as director, UK retail. He will be in charge of overseeing sales of long-only and absolute return funds from Man as well as GLG to third parties such as life offices, platforms, and IFAs.

Anthony Cheung, a fund manager specialised in China in the global emerging markets team at Gartmore Investment Management, has been recruited by Pictet Asset Management, and has joined the Asian total return team, in which he will be co-manager of long/short funds, under Nidhi Mahhurkar, CityWire reports.

On 10 June, the CNMV announced that it has granted permission, at the request of the asset management firm BBVA Asset Management and of BBVA as the depository, to convert the real estate fund BBVA Propriedad into a REIT format real estate investment firm. Assets in the fund as of the end of April, according to statistics from the Spanish Inverco association of management firms, totalled EUR1.3bn.

The Spanish arm of Société Générale was issued a license by the CNMV on 10 June to release the Lyxor Active Commodities Fund and Lyxor Epsilon Global Trend Fund sub-funds of its Irish Sicav Investments Strategies Plc.The regulator has also issued sales licenses to Allfunds Bank for the C, I and S share classes in the French-registered fund Saint-Honoré Signatures Financières (see Newsmanagers of 20 April), from Edmond de Rothschild Investment Managers (EdRIM).

Julio Segura, president of the Spanish securities commission (CNMV), says that rating agencies continue to be subject to conflicts of interest, so long as they are paid by issuers that they rate, Cinco Días reports. At an unveiling of a book entitled “A century of Spanish financial history,” at the Bank of Spain, Segura stated that the solution would be to make ratings be paid for by those who use them, since the creation of an official agency would run the risk of creatind problems when it came to ratings of government bonds.

According to an annual survey by the French financial management association (AFG) of employee savings levels, assets under management in this area as of the end of December totalled a record EUR88.6bn, which represents a 4.5% increase over a total fo USD84.8bn as of the end of 2009 (as of the end of 2008, they were down to EUR71.42bn, comapred with EUR87.6bn twelve months earlier).The AFG states that contributions to employee savings plans totalled EUR13.3bn in 2010, compared with EUR11.8bn in 2009, an increase of 12.7%, “largely due to an increase in employees’ voluntary contributions,” which themselves represented EUR4.2bn. Meanwhile, redemptions totalled EUR10.6bn, so that net subscriptions totalled EUR2.7bn, of which over EUR880m (about one third of net inflows) were for PERCO plans.

On 22 April 2011, the Italian UniCredit bank announced that it will not be selling its asset management unit Pioneer Investments, and will be preferring internal growth. The announcement marked the end of a long period of uncertainty and speculation about the future of the firm, which was being wooed by the French firms Amundi and Natixis. Despite these difficult times, in 2010, the Paris office of Pioneer had “its best year ever” in terms of inflows, according to the director, Fabien Madar. The firm has posted net inflows of EUR300m, and finished the year with EUR1.5bn of assets under management. “2010 was a year of great success for our sales team. We needed to show that despite the strategic review our company was subject to, our future was not up in the air. We therefore needed to stay close to clients, which we did, and which they appreciated.” And since the beginning of the year, the Paris office has taken on a further EUR100m, putting assets at EUR1.6bn, of which 60% are for wholesale clients, and 40% for institutionals. The objective is to achieve net subscriptions of EUR250m by the end of the year. Madar’s ambitions don’t stop at the borders of France, and also extend to Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and since May, the Netherlands and Nordic countries, an area which represents slightly over EUR1bn in assets. The new position was handed to Madar following the departure of Jilert Blom, who had been head of the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. Combining these countries with the French-speaking ones can be explained as due to the fact that these markets are both institutional and wholesale, and they are at the same level of technicity as France, Madar says. Pioneer has now built itself a presence serving Dutch clients and a few in Sweden. But the firm, led by Madar, is also planning to develop in Denmark, Finland, and Norway. One sales person based in Amsterdam will be serving all these markets, while a country manager for the entire region is in a recruitment phase. For these countries, “we have no quantitative objectives for the moment, but rather qualitative objectives: to take on as many clients as possible,” says Madar. As to a potential physical presence in Scandinavia, that will come in time, depending on the results of ongoing development.

The official appointment of Xavier Guillon as head of Oyster Funds, the investment fund division of Banque Syz & Co, was announced on12 October. The manager has now passed the starting line, and is into the course, and so can now talk to Newsmanagers about the major outlines of his development strategy.

The British investment management association (IMA) claims that reforms to the financial services compensation scheme (FSCS) could make the British market more attractive as a platform for international management groups. The failures of the past three years (the Keydata affair not least) had a cost of about EUR500m for the financial services industry, the chairman of the professional association, Douglas Ferrans, says, and calls on the FSA to make reform of the compensation regime a priority.

In a letter cited by the Wall Street Journal, the head of enforcement at the SEC, Robert Khuzami, has refused to disclose details to Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, Republican head of the legal commission, about the way in which the regulatory authority has made use of referrals from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) about questionable transactions by the hedge fund management firm SEC Capital Advisors. The senator says that he considers the response unacceptable.

Zvi Goffer, a former Galleon Group trader nicknamed Octopussy, as well as his brother Emanuel Goffer and Michael Kimelman been found guilty of insider trading, according to the Financial Times. They are accused of trading ahead of corporate takeover announcements of which they learnt from two Ropes & Gray lawyers advising the companies on the deals.

Markus Novak, who had served at Skandia at head of distribution clients, wealth management firms and banks in Germany, has joined JPMorgan Asset Management as second in command to Charles Neus, concentrating on sales to insurers and their networks.

30 institutional investors, with combined assets under management of about USD1trn, have sent a letter to companies of the Russell 1000 index, calling on them to accept the “new reality” of ESG (environmental, social and governance) risks, and to plan for it in their business planning. These issues cannot be considered areas “off the balance sheet,” the investors say. “They are rather concrete financial issues which represent both risks and opportunities for the long-term success of businesses,” they say. The Californian pension funds CalPERS and CalSTRS, which are among the signatories, had already announced last month that they had decided to better integrate ESG criteria into all of their investment decisions.

The alternative boutique BBVA & Partners (EUR200m in assets) from Saragossa is now wholly owned by BBVA Asset Management, which has been joined by its three partners, León Baltolomé, Pablo Gil and Juan Uguet, who had previously owned 30% of the former firm.Funds People also reports that the BBVA & Partners funds have been transferred to the Luxembourg Sicav from BBVA Durbana International Fund, which has a sales license for Spain. The funds include the BBVA & Partners Retorno Absoluto FIL (EUR21m), BBVA Partners Ahorro Dinámico, BBVA Partners Augustus, BBVA Partners Dynamic and BBVA Partners European Absolute Return.

The website e.fundresearch.at has announced that the Scandinavian institutional management firm DnB NOR Asset Management (EUR57bn in assets) in May acquired an operating license for Austria.Mike Judith, vice president of the firm and head of distribution for Germany, says that the nine best-known equities funds from the Carlson Funds brand are now available on the local market.

At the conclusion of a call for bids which opened on 22 October last year, for a renewed overlay management mandate, the French national pension fund, the Fonds de réserve pour les retraites (FRR), on 10 June announced that it has awarded the mandate to State Street Global Advisors France. The mandate will be for a renewable two-year period. The mission of the provider will be to inform and advise the FRR, to ensure currency risk management and to manage exposure of various asset classes defined by the FRR board, the fund says in a statement.

La banque privée londonienne de Fortis ne va finalement pas fusionner avec BNP Paribas Wealth Management, révèle L’Agefi, mais va être vendue, selon une source proche du dossier. De taille modeste, Fortis Private Investment Management, est axée sur la clientèle domestique mais ne peut s’appuyer sur un réseau bancaire tandis que le dispositif onshore (pour résidents) de BNP Paribas Wealth Management repose sur la banque de détail du groupe, explique le quotidien.

La banque privée londonienne de Fortis ne va finalement pas fusionner avec BNP Paribas Wealth Management, révèle L’Agefi, mais va être vendue, selon une source proche du dossier. De taille modeste, Fortis Private Investment Management, est axée sur la clientèle domestique mais ne peut s’appuyer sur un réseau bancaire tandis que le dispositif onshore (pour résidents) de BNP Paribas Wealth Management repose sur la banque de détail du groupe, explique le quotidien.

According to the most recent statistics from JPMorgan, exposure by US money market funds to securities issued by Euro zone banks as of the end of May had fallen to USD361bn, about 40% of the USD902bn allocation to non-US banks, the Wall Street Journal reports. As of the end of March 2010, when the debt crisis broke, the percentage was 50.9%. Exposure to Spanish banks had fallen 85%, to USD6bn, compared with USD40bn as of the end of March 2010. It had fallen 70% for Belgian banks, and 75% for Italian banks. It has also fallen 25% for German banks, and 9% for French banks. However, exposure to Swedish banks has risen 95%, while exposure to Norwegian banks has increased 53%, and to Canadian banks, 49%.

State Street Global Advisors will be launching its first range of ETFs in the United Kingdom next quarter, Investment Week reports. In total, the US management firm, which is one of the largest ETF suppliers in the United States, is planning to launch 50 products in the UK in the next two years.

By the end of the year, Vanguard Investments UK (GBP1.9bn in assets) is planning to increase the number of its funds on sale in the UK from 14 currently to 25, Fundweb reports. Among the products for which a sales license has been applied for from the FSA are some ETFs, risk objective funds, horizon funds, and a strategic allocation fund. Tom Rampulla, CEO, also says that personnel will be increased by the end of the year to 105, from 68 currently.

Maple Group Acquisition Corp., the vehicle which has been launched for a counter-bid to acquire the Toronto stock exchange (TMX, which is being wooed by the London Stock Exchange), bringing together Canadian banks and pension funds, on Sunday announced that it has signed up four new members: The Quebec financial group Desjardins, GMP Capital, Dundee Capital Markets, and Manulife Financial.

Ainsi que l’annonçait Newsmanagers le 25 mai, Pictet Asset Management met la dernière main à un fonds crédit susceptible de capturer une bonne partie des hausses et de protéger le portefeuille, voire d'être gagnant en cas de baisse.Il s’agit d’un long/short coordonné, qui n’a pas encore obtenu son agrément de commercialisation de la CSSF luxembourgeoise mais qui a été testé en réel dans l’incubateur-maison. Il utilisera une approche valeur relative sur le crédit, sera un produit multistratégies avec des paris directionnels et non directionnels, et présentera un positionnement actif en matière de négoce et un aspect événementiel. Il investira principalement dans des titres de catégorie investissement, sans contrainte géographique, mais avec une couverture des risques de change et de duration.Le gestionnaire helvétique prépare également une version asiatique de ce fonds, qui pourrait être lancée au quatrième trimestre, ainsi que des OPCVM long/short actions qui, si tout va bien, seront mis sur le marché au début de l’an prochain.