Financial Times Guide to Investing in Funds

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The manager

Controls over the fund

There is a final dimension to the legal structure. As any normal com-

pany, the fund and any manager/advisor it may delegate to are owned

by shareholders who have the potential to vote and therefore to wield

significant influence over the companies’ behaviour. The shareholders

are referred to in the regulatory world as controllers, whether they are

individuals or companies, and whether they actually have ownership

or potentially have the power to influence management. Typically

the board of directors of the fund will also be made up of individu-

als from the manager or the advisor. The controllers are relevant as

they can have a significant impact on the actions of the fund or the

manager/advisor and may also be subject to conflicts of interest, for

example, where the ownership of the fund is in the same hands as that

of the manager. In fact, think about this for a moment. Although very

common, you can see an immediate conflict in that the board of the

fund may no longer independently determine whether the actions of

the manager, with which it has a connection, are being taken for the

benefit of the fund’s investors. This could include a fund deciding to

prevent the redemption of your investment, sometimes for reasons

that might hardly be credible, as was the case in 2009.

A good example of when preventing the exit of investors may not be

in the best interest of investors is when an investment strategy has

failed to deliver returns or has incurred some significant losses, but

not crashed and burned. Imagine you are invested in such a strategy.

The manager may still wish to continue to get paid a management fee

in order to sustain its business and therefore keep your money in the

fund. You on the other hand would rather have your money back as

you may simply need the cash or prefer to invest in another oppor-

tunity. During the financial crisis of 2008, this led to the obvious

question for some boards of directors of funds: what should they do?

The choice was to suspend redemptions or to raise gates to delay the

process of redemption, or indeed to give money back to investors. This

had to be decided by funds largely at the bequest of the manager that

had a direct interest in continuing to be paid as opposed to progress-

ing on the basis of what was in the best interest of investors. Today

this remains controversial: even as I write, many of the gates that were

raised after 2008 remain in place. What made things worse was that