Content area
Full Text
MONEY MANAGEMENT
In the span of one hectic week, Old Mutual Asset Management added a growth equity shop to round out its stable of more than 15 money managers, while scrambling to salvage one of its leading value equity subsidiaries.
The salvaging came first, with just less than $18 billion of the Old Mutual group's $209 billion in institutional and retail assets under management at stake. Consultants predict Old Mutual will have more luck holding on to the retail half of that money than the institutional half.
On Sept. 29, the three senior members of the six-man portfolio management team at Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Pacific Financial Research Inc. - a deep value equity shop - told Old Mutual they would leave the firm at the end of the year.
In a telephone interview, Old Mutual President and CEO Scott Powers said the departure of James H. Gipson, PFR's 62-year-old founder, president and CEO, was not unexpected, but news that fellow principals Michael C. Sandler and Bruce G. Veaco would move on at the same time forced the parent company to work out a succession plan in "real time."
On Sept. 30, Old Mutual announced that Dallas-based Barrow, Hanley, Mewhinney & Strauss Inc. - another deep value equity shop and the group's largest, with more than $53 billion in assets - would assume responsibility for managing PFR's institutional and retail assets.
In an interview, James P. Barrow, the president of BHMS, said his firm - a concentrated, deep-value investor like PFR - answered Old Mutual's call, as otherwise those billions of dollars in group assets "might have disappeared."
The...