The revolving door at The Children’s Investment Fund keeps on spinning: The top man in Asia at the activist hedge fund shop has resigned, the third high-ranking executive to leave the firm this year.
John Ho is leaving the London-based TCI, the Financial Times reports. According to a letter to investors from firm founder Christopher Hohn, Ho is resigning for personal reasons.
Ho was the point man in TCI’s highly-publicized activist battle with Japan’s largest electric utility last year. The hedge fund lost its proxy battle against Electric Power Development Co., better known as J-Power, losing US$130 million on its investment, which it exited in October.
Ho’s departure is the third by a top TCI executive this year. The two of the last three founding partners—Hohn is the last standing—quit the firm earlier this year, with Patrick Degorce retiring at the beginning of the year due to illness, and Snehal Amin quitting last month to found his own hedge fund in the U.S. The departures come in the wake of TCI’s worst-ever year in 2008, when the firm’s funds lost more than 40% of their value.
The Children's Investment Fund in India
Of late, the fund became the largest seller of Indian stocks among foreign institutional investors. It sold 10% of all the stock sold by foreign investors in India this year, valued at $222.2 million. That’s about one-third of the $666.6 million in Indian stocks owned by TCI last year.T
In one of its most distinct moves, the activist investor which owns about 2.01% in Sterlite got the company to drop its restructuring plans. Christopher Hohn led TCI alleged that the proposed restructring plan would benefit the promoters and will go against the interest of minority shareholders.