Malta gains UK acceptance amid Dominion fund plans

Malta took a step closer to becoming a recognised home for UK retail funds this week, after Dominion Fund Management said it would be creating a Malta-domiciled global thematic fund range and selling it through UK retail platforms.

The Guernsey-based fund boutique is renaming its Dominion Chic fund, which aims to play emerging market growth by owning luxury goods providers and became five years old last month, as the Global Trends Consumer fund under the plans.

It is also launching a new Global Trends Strategic fund, subject to regulatory approval, to identify 14 macroeconomic investment themes that the managers believe will generate outperformance in the longer-term. It will be benchmarked to the MSCI World index.

Both funds will be structured as Ucits IV sub funds of the Dominion Global Trends Sicav domiciled in Malta. They will be managed by Dominion’s star manager Arjen Los, who is based in Singapore and was previously research director of European equities at Merrill Lynch from 1995-2000.

The Strategic fund has been managed on paper for the past nine months and outperformed the index by 2 percentage points over that period. It will carry a retail minimum investment requirement of £2,000 and will carry an annual management charge of 1.5 per cent.

The fledgling boutique’s sales effort is now being led by UK sales director Matthew Deeprose, formerly head of sales for Skandia from 2003-2008. He said the fund would be available for sale to UK investors through all the major fund platforms.

Ed Dymott, head of business development at Fidelity, said the fund’s Malta domicile should not be a barrier as long as the product quality was good.

Graham Bentley, head of proposition at Skandia, also said the fund’s Maltese domicile was unlikely to deter investors, who would be looking at its performance track record rather than its offshore location.