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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Real Man who wrote (16424)	2/3/2009 2:57:52 PM
From: RockyBalboa	Respond to of 71454

And here are your pensions madeoff: Fund of fund hasn´t done its homework! Massachusetts Pension Fires Austin, Ivy Hedge Funds (Update1) Email \| Print \| A A A By Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, which oversees $38 billion, voted to fire hedge-fund firm Austin Capital Management after losing $12 million with alleged Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff. The state pension board also decided at a meeting in Boston today to dismiss Ivy Asset Management, the hedge-fund unit of Bank of New York Mellon Corp., because several senior managers have left the firm. About $430 million in pension assets were invested with Ivy and $130 million with Austin, the board said. Austin invested pension assets with Tremont Partners, the hedge-fund unit of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. Tremont placed money through its Rye Select Broad Market Prime Fund LP with Madoff, the New York financier accused of fraud in a scheme that may have cost clients $50 billion. “We have learned from this,” State Treasurer Timothy Cahill said at the meeting. The pension fund has examined all of its hedge-fund portfolios and “found that there are no other Bernie Madoffs in the funds,” Cahill said. Massachusetts’ state pension has about $4.2 billion in assets in absolute-return strategies and portable-alpha investments, which try to beat market benchmarks by investing in hedge funds. The pension fund’s hedge-fund holdings dropped 19 percent in 2008, while the average fund of hedge funds fell 20 percent last year, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. Supervision Questioned Members of the pension’s investment staff told the board in a report today that Austin, based in Austin, Texas, didn’t adequately monitor its investments. While Austin executives had said they would visit investment managers once a year, they hadn’t gone to Madoff since 2005, the report said. Austin is owned by the asset-management division of KeyCorp. Ivy Asset, based in Jericho, New York, manages about $7.5 billion in assets. The Massachusetts pension plan terminated the contract with Ivy after the hedge-fund manager cut 30 percent of its 165-member staff and key executives departed. Co-President Michael Singer and Stuart Davies, the head of investments, left last month. Mike Dunn, a spokesman for New York-based BNY Mellon, declined to comment. Laura Mimura, a spokeswoman for Cleveland- based KeyCorp didn’t immediately return a phone call. To contact the reporter on this story: Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam in Boston at sbhaktavatsa@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: February 3, 2009 14:11 EST