The head of alternative investments at Nestlé’s internal asset manager has retired, IPE has learnt.

Thierry Ralet was head of alternatives at Nestlé Capital Management from September 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He was chief financial officer at Nestlé Capital Advisors (NCA) for almost four years before that.

His retirement is effective 1 December.

His departure coincides with Nestlé overhauling its global pension management operations, as part of which it is withdrawing from providing regulated services such as asset management. The activities of NCM are being discontinued in connection with this.

As reported, Nestlé recently stripped its internal asset managers of a number of mandates and appointed BlackRock as interim investment manager.

Other departures at NCM include that of Duncan Sanford, who led NCM’s UK operations as CEO and CIO and is understood to have left the manager effective 3 May 2017. This was the same day BlackRock officially took over from NCM and NCA as manager of the Robusta funds, which is the umbrella fund through which pension assets of Nestlé’s international pension schemes are pooled.

Alliance, its €622m Dutch pension fund, has divested from hedge funds that were part of Robusta, and also withdrew an allocation to European small caps.

Jayne Atkinson, previously investment manager for Nestlé’s UK pension fund, left the company earlier this year. She is now CIO for Unilever’s UK pension fund.

Nestlé has CHF23bn (€21bn) in pension assets across the countries in which it operates. Many of its branches have separate pension entities.

According to the company’s 2016 full-year report, NCM was managing CHF10.4bn at year-end, almost unchanged compared to 2015 (CHF10.8bn). External managers ran most of the remaining assets, including the majority of investments for the Pensionsfonds and Pensionskasse in Germany.

 

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