Strike another blow for the trade imbalance. In January the U.S. will lose one of its best investors when Mark Anson leaves CalPERS to take the reins of London-based Hermes Pensions Management, whose CEO, Tony Watson, is retiring.
As CalPERS’s chief investment officer since 2001, Anson has led the charge by the U.S.'s biggest public pension plan to improve corporate governance among the companies in which it invests. He has also pushed CalPERS more aggressively into alternative assets, including private equity, hedge funds and real estate.
Anson, 47, won’t directly oversee investments at Hermes, which is owned by British Telecom’s pension plan. Rather, he’ll be running one of the U.K.'s biggest money management firms: Hermes boasts about $103 billion in assets from more than 220 pension funds, including BT’s.
He’s looking forward to stepping back from the daily grind of managing money. “When you think about what I did at CalPERS, I really ran an asset management company that was embedded in a public agency, and that required a combination of the skills of both a chief executive and a chief investment officer,” says Anson, who before joining CalPERS in October 1999 was a portfolio manager for OppenheimerFunds in New York. “This opportunity allows me to separate the two and concentrate more on the chief executive position.” He plans to spend Thanksgiving in London with his wife and two kids, looking for a place to live.
Anson’s jurisdiction may be changing, but his role as a corporate governance watchdog is not. Hermes has long played a strong leadership role among U.K. shareholder activists, going after companies like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which the firm recently sued for instituting a poison-pill takeover defense without shareholders’ consent. “Corporate governance is part of my core set of values,” says Anson.
