Peugeot Pensionskasse, PensionDanmark, AP4, LSE Group, Polaris, State Street, BNP Paribas, QMA, PGIM, Deutsche AM, Northern Trust, Pictet, Julius Baer

Peugeot Pensionskasse – Olaf Keese has become chief risk officer at Germany’s Peugeot Pensionskasse in connection with a reshuffle linked to the upcoming retirement of the head of the pension fund. Jean-Marie Porté, who has been with the Pensionskasse for more than 20 years, is leaving at the end of the year. Christof Blank, who joined the board in April, will take over from Porté.

Blank was chief executive of PSA Peugeot Citroën from 2013 to 2016, and has been managing director of Peugeot Deutschland’s support fund since March and on the board of PSA Peugeot Citroën Deutschland’s contractual trust arrangement since December 2016. Bernd Bach, who is employed with the PSA group, is the other member of the Pensionskasse’s board, with Keese joining at the beginning of November as the required third board member. 

Keese was previously the managing director of German pension provider S-Pensionsmanagement. He also held positions on the boards of Sparkassen Pensionskasse, Sparkassen Pensionsfonds and Heubeck. At S-Pensionsmanagement he was replaced by Wolfgang Wiest.

PensionDanmark – Jens-Christian Stougaard, senior vice-president at PensionDanmark, is leaving the pension provider after 13 years to “pursue new challenges”, he stated on his LinkedIn page. He joined the group in 2004 as an executive assistant before being promoted to lead the management secretariat a year later. Stougaard has also served as treasurer and subsequently chairman of Dansif, the Danish institutional investor network.

PensionDanmark was named European Pension Fund of the Year at the IPE Awards in Prague on Tuesday.

AP4 – Lars Åberg has been appointed as the new deputy chairman of AP4, the fourth of Sweden’s national pensions buffer funds. He succeeds Jakob Grinbaum, who stepped down from the job on 5 October at his own request. Åberg has held various executive roles in the Swedish financial sector, having worked at AMF Pension from 1997 to 2013 and at the other three AP funds during the 1990s. He has been working as an independent consultant since 2013.

London Stock Exchange Group – CEO Xavier Rolet has left LSE with immediate effect after several weeks of speculation and investor pressure. He had originally intended to leave at the end of next year, but one shareholder, The Children’s Investment Fund, called for Rolet’s tenure to be extended and called for a general meeting of shareholders.

In a statement yesterday, LSE said chief financial officer David Warren would take over as interim CEO until a permanent successor is found. It also said that the company’s board “continues to believe” that the lengthy transition period initially planned would have been in the best interests of the group.

Donald Brydon, chairman of the LSE Group board, said he would not stand for re-election in 2019. The statement said that Brydon and the board had agreed that “at that point it would be in shareholders’ interests to have a new team at the helm to steer the future progress of the company”.

Rolet said: “Since the announcement of my future departure on 19 October, ‎there has been a great deal of unwelcome publicity, which has not been helpful to the company. At the request of the board, I have agreed to step down as CEO with immediate effect. I will not be returning to the office of CEO or director under any circumstances. I am proud of what we have achieved during the past eight and a half years.”

LSE’s share price has declined by 2.2% since the initial announcement of Rolet’s departure on 19 October.

Polaris Investment Advisory – Thomas Friese, former head of global pensions at Nokia Group, is one of four new senior advisors at Polaris, which specialises in business development and marketing for alternative asset managers. Hanspeter Bader, Baldomero Falcones and Matthias Knab have also joined the Polaris senior advisory board. Before joining Nokia Group Friese was in charge of infrastructure projects and investments at the Siemens Group for 26 years. Bader worked for Unigestion for 17 years, most recently in the position of head of private equity/private assets. Matthias Knab is founder and managing director of Opalesque, a global news and research portal for alternative investments. Falcones has worked as a member of the management executive committee of Banco Santander and as chairman of MasterCard International, among other roles.

State Street Global Advisors – Jenny Yoe has been appointed head of UK pensions, to lead the UK defined benefit sales and client-facing teams. She joins from River & Mercantile Asset Management, where she was head of UK institutional. Before that she was director of UK distribution for AMG Limited. 

BNP Paribas Asset Management – Philip Dawes has been appointed to the newly created role of head of institutional sales for the UK and Ireland. He reports to Charles Janssen, head of institutional sales for Europe. Dawes joined from Allianz Global Investors (AGI), where he worked for 16 years in a variety of roles, including head of UK institutional. Before that he was head of consultant relations for Europe and chaired AGI’s global consultant relations group.

QMA/PGIM – John Gee-Grant will join quantitative investment specialist QMA, part of the US asset manager PGIM, in January. He takes on a newly created role as head of international distribution and global consultant relations, based in London. Gee-Grant was previously head of global consultant relations at BlackRock.

Deutsche Asset Management – Mark McDonald has joined as global head of private equity secondaries. Most recently, McDonald was global head of secondary advisory at Credit Suisse and a senior member of the screening committee for the firm’s private fund group. He led the development and implementation of the group’s secondary strategy. He was also previously a senior member of Keyhaven Capital Partners. 

Northern Trust – Mike Mahoney has been recruited as a transition manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), with a focus on insurance companies and financial institutions across the region. He reports to Craig Blackbourn, who was appointed as head of transition management for EMEA in January 2017. Mahoney was previously at State Street Global Markets where he was a transition manager and portfolio trader for the last eight years.

Pictet/Julius Baer – Boris Collardi, CEO of Swiss private bank and asset manager Julius Baer, has left the company after eight years at the helm. From next year he will join Pictet Group’s board of partners, taking joint responsibility for the company’s global wealth management business alongside Rémy Best.

Topics