EquitiesSep 9 2013

Sanjeev Shah leaves fund management

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Mr Shah said he had decided to step back from running the company’s flagship £2.8bn Special Situations fund next year, and that he was handing it to small-cap star Alex Wright.

He told clients on a conference call that he was “not burnt out” but that he no longer wanted to put the necessary “intensity” into the job.

The move means Mr Shah spent just more than five-and-a-half years running the product which he inherited from Anthony Bolton in January 2008.

Mark Dampier, head of research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said it was with “great regret” that Mr Shah was stepping back from fund management.

“There are not that many good managers around so to lose one is a real shame,” he said.

Mr Dampier added: “It is with great regret that someone at 42 is leaving fund management as he should be coming into his own.”

The forthcoming change has led backers of Mr Wright’s small-cap fund to raise questions about the “challenge” that will now be put on him when he takes on Mr Shah’s fund alongside his product and his Special Values investment trust.

Ian Aylward, head of multi-manager research at Aviva Investors, said he invested in Mr Wright’s small-cap fund and would be meeting the manager to find out about the “demands on his time now and how it will be split”.

“I’ll also ask if it is a role that Sanjeev has found very intense, how might Alex cope with the intensity?” he added.

The multi-manager added that he would also be seeking to find out more about the “experience and appropriateness” of Mr Wright’s co-manager Jonathan Winton and wanted to find out how the “DNA of the Special Situations fund might evolve given Alex’s prior lack of focus on mega caps”.

Gary Potter, co-head of multi-manager at Thames River, said he also invested in Mr Wright’s fund and would be keen to find out how the manager’s time would be divided.

“Alex has done a good job on the small-cap fund and an issue for us is to understand where the small-cap fund now fits in his roster,” he said.

“The more mandates you give someone there have to be priorities and he will have a £3bn fund and £300m fund.

“We are happy with the small cap fund and want that to continue and that is what they should be ensuring.”

Morningstar OBSR, which usually suspends a fund rating when there is a manager move, went a step further in an analyst note which said Mr Wright was “as yet unproven” in terms of his ability to manage an all-cap fund.

“We have a high regard for Alex Wright as a small-cap equity manager, however, we believe that this mandate represents new challenges for him, including the exposure to large-cap equity and managing a large asset base,” the note said.

The company removed the Special Situations fund’s Silver rating and changed it to Neutral.

Within Fidelity, the group also passed the £2.1bn UK-domiciled South East Asia fund to Teera Chanpongsang to give incumbent Allan Liu the chance to focus solely on the larger $4.7bn (£3bn) Luxembourg-domiciled version.

Mr Chanpongsang, who also runs the group’s offshore Emerging Asia fund, has seen his India Focus fund passed to Tim Orchard.

Elsewhere, Allianz Global Investors said it would pass the management of the £356.5m Allianz Bric Stars fund to its San Diego-based emerging markets team led by Kunal Ghosh in October because Michael Konstantinov had left the company after 19 years.

The company had heavily promoted the Bric Stars fund, which reached £964m at the end of 2010 but steadily fell to its present level.

The manager did produce a positive return during his tenure of 31.8 per cent, however, this was below the MSCI Bric index benchmark’s gains of 54.6 per cent, according to FE Analytics.

Barings’ Agnes Deng, who managed the group’s $2.4bn Dublin-domiciled Hong Kong China fund, left the company and was replaced by Laura Luo who was hired from Schroders.

Ms Luo ran Schroders’ $876m ISF China Opportunities fund among other funds.

Schroders also hired a manager last week after bringing Mark Lacey onboard as a co-manager for its energy mandates.

Mr Lacey previously worked at Investec Asset Management before leaving in July last year to work for commodities trader Mercuria.