Après l’abandon de CariVerona, qui refuse de participer à la levée de capitaux en cours, les autres actionnaires d’UniCredit font bloc, rapporte Il Sole - 24 Ore du 8 février. CRT, Central Bank of Lybia et Munich Re seraient prêts à couvrir les 500 millions d’obligations convertibles non souscrites par la fondation CariVerona.
Dans un entretien à L"Echo, Charles Muller, directeur général adjoint de l’Alfi (Association Luxembourgeoise des Fonds d’Investissements), estime que l"impact de l"affaire Madoff sur la place luxembourgeoise reste limité. «Dans les chiffres, nous sommes touchés, mais certainement moins que d’autres. Sur l’ensemble de l’année 2008, nous avons perdu 25 % des avoirs sous gestion. 85 % de cette baisse est due à la baisse des marchés, le reste aux retraits des clients qui se sont concentrés principalement sur les mois de septembre et octobre, avec des montants de 28 milliards puis 69 milliards. Le reste de l’année, les ventes nettes sont restées légèrement excédentaires, ce qui n’est pas un mauvais résultat en soi. En tous les cas, il n’y a aucune tendance permettant de dire que nous avons perdu perd des clients à cause de l’affaire Madoff?», indique-t-il au quotidien.
The Financial Times reports that the brokerage unit of UBS, UBS Financial Services, has launched an aggressive recruitment campaign in the United States, offering financial advisors huge payoffs for joining the firm from competitors such as Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup. The bank is promising the brokers welcome packages worth about three times their annual income, the FT reports.
The board of directors at the Singapore sovereign fund Temasek Holdings (Private) Limited has appointed the American Charles ?Chip? W. Goodyear as its future CEO. He has been director since 1 February, and will become ?CEO-designate? on 1 March, and on 1 October will succeed Ho Ching, the wife of the prime minister, as CEO. Goodyear left a position as head of BHP Billiton on 1 January 2008. He is the first foreigner to lead Temasek.
On Friday, a spokesman for Harvard Management Company, which manages the Harvard University endowment, confirmed that about 25% of its 200-person staff will be laid off in the next few months, Pensions & Investments reports. The new management, led by Jane Mendillo, has decided to change the firm’s profile, two months after the president of Harvard University revealed that the endowment had shrunk by at least 22% to USD29bn in the first four months of the fiscal year ending on 30 June.
In 2008, assets in the pension fund Andra AP-fondent (AP2) contracted by SEK54.2bn, to SEK173.3bn, after net inflows of SEK900m are taken into account, Pensions & Investments reports. In gross, total decline in assets thus totalled SEK55.1bn, or 24%. Virtually all portfolios managed actively, either internally or under outsourcing contracts, returned outperformance. AP2 reports that the average losses of 24% are largely due to equities mandates and some OTC assets, which were poorly positioned during the period of extreme turbulence on the financial markets last fall.
The British management firm Silkinvest has announced that it has been issued licenses to sell the UCITS III funds Silk Arab Falcons and Silk African Lions in Germany. The two sub-funds, the former of which is specialised geographically in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Egypt and Morocco, while the latter specialises in South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana, may invest in bonds and certificates as well as derivatives. For the two products, front-end fees are a maximum of 5%, says Das Investment, while management commissions are 2.09% for retail investors and 1.59% for institutional investors. If performance exceeds 8%, Silkinvest will charge a 20% commission on performance above this threshold.
Following the transfer of Pioneer Investments Austria to Pioneer Global Asset Management (PGAM) on 1 January 2009, the management firm has appointed a new CEO, in the person of Werner Kretschmer, who will replace Helmut Sobotka, 59, who headed the firm throughout the time that it was owned by UniCredit Bank Austria.Kretschmer was most recently head of private banking and asset management activities at Bank Austria. Hannes Roubik has also been appointed head of sales, and a board member, at Pioneer Investments Austria. From 2004 to early 2009, he was a manager at the asset management arm of Bank Austria.
Following the announcement that CariVerona is refusing to participate in the round of fundraising now underway at UniCredit, other shareholders are lining up in support of the bank, Il Sole - 24 Ore reports on 8 February. CRT, the Central Bank of Libya, and Munich Re are all reportedly prepared to take up the slack by purchasing 500 million convertible bonds not subscribed to by the CariVerona foundation.
Il Sole - 24 Ore reports on & February that the list of victims of Bernard Madoff includes Thybo Investments, the investment firm that manages the fortune of the famous German Thyssen-Bornemisza family. The entity, which has offices in London, Monaco and the British Virgin islands, had about USD2.5bn in assets under management for the German family and other high-profile investors in 2007. Part of that sum was invested with Madoff. Products suspected of having invested with the American manager had Ernst & Young as their auditor and UBS as administrator, the Italian newspaper reports.
With the new management firm Avana Invest GmbH, Götz J.Kirchhoff and Thomas W. Uhlmann have created a new management firm which will offer institutional investors a solution based on ETFs, which filter the Stoxx 600 index on the basis of trading volumes and fundamentals. The two former heads of Indexchange (HVB group), which was acquired by Barclays Global Investors, are planning to offer solutions in the form of open-ended funds, institutional funds, and mandates, Kirchhoff has told Newsmanagers. Kirchhoff left the board of BGI Germany at the end of March 2008.
From 1 April, money market funds will no longer be allowed to invest in private sector bonds rated less than A, Expansión reports. The change is announced in a new circular published by the CNMV. The regulator had initially planned to forbid all use of certificates rated below AA, but backed off that harder line after a market consultation. Previously, money market funds were allowed to invest up to 25% in bonds rated at least BBB.Since 1 January, funds have been required to evaluate the bonds they invest in much more strictly.
Chris Morgan Jones, former director of European consulting at Kroll, has teamed up with Ashley Dale, former head of European sales at CLSA, and Alistair Candlish, a former portfolio manager at BlueCrest, to found Morgan Dale, the Financial Times reports. The hedge fund will use intelligence networks similar to those used by private detectives to obtain privileged information in emerging countries.
The German agency Kommalpha announced on Friday that it has signed a cooperation agreement with the Swiss management firm fortune Fund Services (FFS, which also has a Luxembourg affiliate), by the terms of which the Hanover-based firm will take charge of the development and deployment of investment strategies, while the Zurich firm will handle distribution and fund administration.The partnership comes as the Swiss authorities are abandoning the ?Swiss finish? for UCITS-compliant funds, which will make access to the Swiss market considerably easier for German fund promoters, while the cooperation with Kommalpha will allow FFS to more easily assist international clients on the German market.
The US Oil Fund (USO) ETF, which represents about 22% of oil futures on the Nymex market, rolled over all its positions on Friday, which provoked a fall in the price of oil to under USD40 per barrel during the trading day, the Wall Street Journal reports. Trading volumes were nearly double their average since the beginning of the year. In the past few months, USO has tripled in size, with net subscriptions of USD3.46bn in December and January, which means that its investment decisions have a highly visible influence on the market.
The open-ended real estate fund DEGI International (about EUR2.5bn in assets), which was closed to redemptions for three months, was reopened a week ago. It appears to have survived the move without running into any liquidity problems, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports, although redemptions were very heavy on the first day.
In Friday trading, shares in Julius Baer had at times lost more than 30% in what may have been a case of market price manipulation, on rumours that the bank had presented doctored results for 2008 that morning, the Börsen-Zeitung reports. It turns out that losses of owners’ equity at the bank described in an anonymous letter in late December were limited to several million Swiss francs, and had been taken into account. KPMG has certified the accounts.
The real estate firm Neinver, which manages the Factory chain, has announced that it has bought the largest factory store outlet mall in Germany, the Zweibrücken Designer Outlet (23,285 square metres, 1,700 parking spaces), Cinco Días reports. The vendors are Kenmore Porperty Group and Revcap. The property will be added to the portfolio of the Irus European Retail Property Fund, one of the largest pan-European funds specialised in retail commercial properties.
Prince Max of Liechtenstein, chairman of the board at LGT Bank, has stated that the German tax scandal kicked off by the Zumwinkel affair has provoked clients of the bank to withdraw billions of Swiss francs. The banker also says he is in favour of signing a legal and tax assistance agreement with the EU, similar to the agreement the Vaduz government has already signed with the United States.
S’il s’est refusé à tout pronostic sur l’ensemble de 2009 et même sur le premier trimestre bien que le chiffre d’affaires ait presque atteint en janvier le niveau record de janvier 2007, Josef Ackermann a souligné que dans des conditions normales, la Deutsche Bank n’aura pas besoin d’argent de l’Etat, rapporte la Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Les fonds propres de premier rang représentent 10,1 % des actifs à risque et l'établissement pas n’a pas besoin non plus d’une structure de défaisance. Le portefeuille de valeurs illiquides se montait fin 2008 à 89 milliards d’euros, mais le président estime que ces actifs «level 3" ont été valorisés au plus près de prix de marché réalistes. Les dépréciations d’actifs ont totalisé 7 milliards d’euros pour 2008 contre 2,3 milliards pour 2007.
Josef Ackermann, directeur général de Deutsche Bank, pense que la proposition de Barack Obama de plafonner à 500.000 dollars la rémunération des dirigeants des banques américaines qui acceptent l"aide de l"Etat est une aubaine, puisqu"elle lui permettra de l"aider à recruter les talents américains, rapporte le Financial Times. « Si les banques US ne peuvent payer qu"un bonus de 500.000 dollars, je pense que les talents seront contents de travailler pour nous », affirme-t-il.
Selon les informations du Handelsblatt, la Commerzbank a créé en interne une bad bank pour ses titres toxiques sur le modèle de la structure de défaisance adopté par la Dresdner Bank en 2002. Le patron de cette unité est Vijay Radhakishun, un spécialiste des restructurations et des ABS. La bad bank sera logée dans le pôple corporates & markets, donc dans la banque d’investissement. La Commerzbank a refusé de commenter.Cette information donne à penser que la Coba va se focaliser d’abord sur la cession de produits complexes et non sur la division des crédits aux pouvoir publics de la filiale Eurohypo.