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06/12/2010

Madoff trustee sues HSBC

Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for Bernard L. Madoff Investments, is suing HSBC for USD9bn, the Financial Times wrote. He is claiming that the bank turned a blind eye to “red flags” that should have caused the institution to stop funnelling money to Mr Madoff. The latest complaint also named as defendants Sonja Kohn, an owner of Bank Medici, members of the Benbassat family as well as several hedge funds.
06/12/2010

“SRI reporting should go beyond mere declarations”

The ERAFP, a capitalisation fund, has become a heavyweight presence on the French market. It awards manates to half a dozen management firms, and stands out for its “all-SRI” policy, inspired by its fundeamental values and favoured by its long-term temporal horizon.
06/12/2010

Brummer & Partners hedge fund to focus on Asia

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } La Tribune reports, citing Bloomberg, that Bummer & Partners, the largest Scandinavian hedge fund, with assets of USD10bn, is preparing to launch an event-driven fund in Asia, seeking to profit from events such as mergers and acquisitions. The fund will have USD150m in seed capital from Brummer & Partners, and its launch is planned for January 2011.
06/12/2010

ETF assets continue to grow strongly

Despite an unfavourable market environment, ETF assets in Europe have continued to increase, by 5.80% in third quarter 2010. As of the end of September, assets totalled USD197.06bn, an increase of 32.94% year on year, the most recent Lipper study finds.The ETF sector, which saw the creation of 41 products in third quarter, continues to be highly concentrated, the study finds. Five providers in Europe account for 90.76% of the market.With 260 ETFs and USD67.41bn in assets, iShares is, as last year, the largest European provider, followed by Lyxor Asset Management (Société Générale), with 203 funds and USD35.10bn, and db x-trackers (Deutsche Bank), with 184 products and USD32bn. In third quarter, their assets increased by 6.43%, 2.81%, and 7.25%, respectively. At the end of the quarter, these three promoters had market shares of 32.23% for iShares, compared with 33.45% in the previous quarter, 18.34% for Lyxor (18.45%), and 16.72% (16.13%) for db x-trackers.In terms of performance, Turkish equities ETFs earned the largest gains of the quarter, according to Lipper.
06/12/2010

Investors start pulling out of bond funds

Bond funds have posted three straight weeks of outflows for the first time since March, the Financial Times wrote citing EPFR. In the week ending Wednesday, investors withdrew USD426m from globally tracked funds that buy bonds.
06/12/2010

UBS Wealth Management recruits a director from HSBC

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Asian Investor reports that UBS Wealth Management has recruited Philip Kunz from HSBC Private Bank. He was appointed director of the South-East Asian market, replacing Susan Co, who has joined the team dedicated to the ultra-high net worth (UHNW) segment at UBS. Kunz will be based in Indonesia.
06/12/2010

Caceis extends its product range in Germany

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Marco Wilms, head of development, has announced at a forum for clients of the WM group that Caceis Bank Deutschland will offer a fund administration service by the end of the month, the Börsen-Zeitung reports.The affiliate of the France’s Crédit Agricole would be the only actor in Germany to offer the full range of settlement services, from depository banking activities to fund administration and securities custody, order payment processing and securities settlement.
06/12/2010

M&G scales up German distribution

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Distribution for the British management firm M&G in the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) has gained the addition of a new “sedentary” team which will be led by Stefan Winkler. The underlying concept for the new entity is to provide ongoing relationship management for each client in the IFA sector, insurance brokers and banking consultants. As investment sales team manager, Winkler will report to Annie Bennett, deputy director of advisory sales, who is based in London. Previously, he spent 11 years at Franklin Templeton Investment, including eight years in distribution to financial advisors, insurers, savings banks and co-operative banks. He joined M&G in June. Winkler will be assisted by Torsten Hansen, investment sales consultant since August, who was previously interlocutor for IFAs on the Hamburg network of Mannheimer Investment Trust, and who spent nine years at Maintrust as internal client advisor serving IFAs, banks and insurers. M&G has also announced that the team will be strengthened by further recruitments in the next 12 months.
06/12/2010

UBS received USD65bn from Fed

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Le Temps reports that, in addition to bailout measures taken by the Swiss confederation and the Swiss National Bank (BNS) in October 2008, UBS also received massive support from the US Fed. In slightly over one year, the US central bank contributed about USD65bn to the Swiss giant, which was then facing massive losses on US real estate loans, and was under fire from Washington for orchestrating tax evasion by high net worth Americans.
06/12/2010

Two appointments to UBS managing board

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } On 3 December, UBS announced that “John Cryan, group CFP, has decided to retire from his position for personal reasons at the end of May 2011, and to pursue other interests outside UBS.” The board of directors has appointed Tom Naratil to the position of group chief financial officer and member of the board at the group, effective from 1 June 2011. Naratil, who will be based in Zurich, was promoted to CFO and chief risk officer for the Wealth Management Americas business unit in 2009. The group has also announced that Sergio Ermotti will serve as chairman and CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and will become a board member at the group, effective from 1 April 2011. He will also be based in Zurich. Before joining UBS, Ermotti worked for UniCredit, where he served as deputy chief executive officer, with responsibility for the corporate and investment banking and private banking strategic units.
06/12/2010

New COO for AWD Switzerland

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } The financial services provider AWD Suisse has announced the appointment of Philippe Signer as chief operations officer (COO), from 1 December 2010. He will be a member of the board for the Hanover-based affiliate of the AWD group, owned by Swiss Life. AWD Suisse has 15 branch offices and employs 400 advisers.
06/12/2010

Santander and Banesto to bail out shareholders in Banif Inmobiliario

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } In three separate filings to the CNMV containing the same text, Santander, Banesto and the real estate management firm Santander Banif Inmobiliario (Santander Real Estate) announced on 3 December that shareholders in the fund, for which redemptions were set to be frozen for two years till February 2011, will be able to resell their shares from this date at face value. Banesto will bear 10.64% of the corresponding costs, while Santander will cover the remaining 89.36%. “The decision was taken for solely commercial reasons,” and Santander states that it will guarantee the liquidity of the fund for a period of two years. As of the end of November, total assets remainat at EUR2.525bn. Since the start of the redemption freeze, the value of shares has lost 17.7%, putting it about 6 points down since the beginning of the year.
06/12/2010

Banif Inmobiliario loses more than EUR300m for its subscribers

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Investors with shares in the real estate fund Santander Banif Inmobiliario can hope to get their money back in March 2011, but they could have done better, Expansión reports. The 43,500 shareholders in the fund, whose redemptions have been frozen since March 2009, have lost 11% of their money since then, for a total of EUR309m. In addition to these losses come the fund’s losses on sales of assets between early 2009 and the present, with significant markdowns on expert valuations. At this pace, Banif Inmobiliario would be liquidated for EUR2.45bn, compared with EUR2.52bn currently, of which EUR2.38bn are held by outside subscribers. According to sources close to Santander, about 31,000 of the 43,500 current shareholders in the fund will have earned a profit nonetheless. The net asset value of the fund, founded in 1995, is currently at its lowest level since 2005.
06/12/2010

Aurélien Lafaye leaves F&C

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Aurélien Lafaye left on Friday the French office of F&C, where he held the position of director of sales for France, Belgium and Monaco. He joined the Paris office of the UK asset management firm in June 2008, from Multiratings, to work with Bruno Moneron, who has since left the firm. The new departure is said to be related to the acquisition of Thames River Capital by F&C, which was concluded in September, and led to a segmentation of the client base (Thames River concentrates on distribution to financial advisers and wealth managers, while F&C focuses on institutional distribution). The French market will continue to be served by the group after the merger from London or Luxembourg.
06/12/2010

Craig Callahan returns to day-to-day management

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Craig Callahan, founder, president, “investment system architect” and chairman of the investment board at the value management firm Icon Advisers, has decided to take charge of management of two of the 17 mutual funds from the firm, the Icon Core Equity and the Icon Long/Short funds, from 3 January 2011.On this date, Bob Strauss, CIO, becomes the principal portfolio manager for the Telecom & Utilities fund, and will also continue to manage the Leisure & Consumer Staples fund.
06/12/2010

Other real estate funds face financial crisis

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Matthias Danne, board member at DekaBank, has announced in a hearing at the Bundestag that there are grounds for concern that there will be extremely high net redemptions if the future law on real estate funds sets a two-year advance notice for redemptions, even for those clients who are already invested in the funds. This shows, Die Welt reports, that even the largest actor in this sector (open-ended real estate funds from Deka have assets of EUR19.8bn) foresee trouble in 2011 (the law would come into force in early 2012).In addition to the three real estate funds whose liquidation was recently announced due to lack of adequate liquidity, seven others may face the same fate. This could potentially affect over one million investors, who for the moment cannot access the EUR23bn they have invested in these products, except by selling their shares on stock markets at a 30% markdown.
06/12/2010

UBS lists three ETF funds in Frankfurt

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } On 3 December, three ETF funds from UBS, one of them Irish-registered and the other two registered in Luxembourg, were admitted to trading on the XTF segment of the Xetra electronic platform from Deutsche Börse. The additions bring the number of ETFs listed on XTF to 756, Deutsche Börse states. The Irish product, UBS ETFs plc - HFRX Global Hedge Index SF (IE00B52TX001), replicates the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index. It charges fees of 0.60%. The other two funds, equities products, belong to the UBS ETF Sicav. One is the UBS-ETF MSCI Emerging Markets A (LU0480132876), which replicates the MSCI Emerging Markets index, with a management commission of 0.65%, while the other is the UBS-ETF MSCI Emerging Markets I (LU0480133098), which tracks the same index, but charges only 0.40%. The latter fund is, as one might expect, aimed primarily at institutional investors.
06/12/2010

Fidelity obtains QFII status

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } A spokesperson for Fidelity Investment Managers Hong Kong has confirmed to Fund Strategy that the management firm and the China Special Situations fund, managed by Anthony Bolton, have been granted the status of Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII), which would allow them to invest directly in Chinese “A” class equities. However, Fidelity has not yet been notified as to what the amount of the quota assigned to it is.
06/12/2010

BBVA AM recruits Gema Martin Espinosa

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } The director of institutional relations at Inversis Banco, Gema Martin Espinosa, has been recruited by BBVA Asset Management as director of “external networks” for Spain and Europe. She will work with three colleagues, two in Spain and one in Milan.
06/12/2010

L'emploi américain fatigue à nouveau

Les 39.000 créations d’emplois aux Etats-Unis pour le mois de novembre annoncées par le département du Travail ont été très inférieures aux attentes. Avec la remontée du chômage, passé de 9,6 % à 9,8%, elles témoignent de la faiblesse de la reprise américaine.
06/12/2010

L’Algérie contrarie les plans de BP

Le gouvernement algérien freinerait le plan de cession de deux champs gaziers de BP dans le pays à son partenaire russe, TNK-BP Holding, pour une valeur de 3 milliards de dollars, selon le quotidien qui cite une source bancaire. Le gouvernement souhaiterait ainsi favoriser la compagnie nationale algérienne, Sonatrach, qui souhaite racheter les champs de BP.

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