Perpetual has announced its deputy head of equities, Anthony Aboud, is to exit the firm later this year after 14 years.
Aboud joined the firm – which has $227 billion in assets under management – in 2012 as an equities analyst and was promoted to portfolio manager in 2015. It is understood Aboud has departed to set up his own fund.
He was manager of the $880 million Perpetual Industrial Share Fund, $339 million Perpetual Pure Equity Alpha Fund and $12 million Perpetual SHARE-PLUS Long-Short Fund.
On the Pure Equity Alpha fund and Share Plus fund, co-portfolio manager Sean Roger will become portfolio manager while Nathan Hughes will take over as portfolio manager of the Industrial Share fund.
Louise Sandberg has been appointed to a newly-created role of head of research and will become co-portfolio manager of the ESG Australia Share fund, she is currently deputy portfolio manager on the Concentrated Equity fund.
A statement from Perpetual said: “We confirm Anthony Aboud will be leaving the Perpetual equities team later this year. Perpetual’s Australian equities team is one of the largest and most experienced in the market, and we have a strong team to carry investment oversight going forward.
“Perpetual has a proven history of orderly succession and promoting talent from within, which ensures continuity in the management of our strategies and ongoing delivery for clients.”
Last week, the firm also announced it had received a takeover bid to acquire the company for $21.64 cash per share which values Perpetual at $2.5 billion. This would be separate to an existing plan for Bain Capital to acquire the firm’s wealth management and corporate trust business later this year.
The firm said it had received an unsolicited, non-binding, conditional and indicative proposal from Windflower Pte Ltd, understood to be an entity indirectly controlled by the $446 billion Swedish private equity giant EQT which has $446 billion in assets under management.
However, the board of Perpetual said it rejected the deal as it failed to represent adequate shareholder value.
“Under the terms of the indicative proposal, Perpetual shareholders would have received A$21.64 cash per share (reduced by the value of any dividends, capital returns or distributions declared or paid by the company),” the firm said in a statement.
“The indicative proposal was highly conditional and did not adequately represent fair value for Perpetual shareholders in the context of a change of control transaction and the board determined that it was not in the best interests of Perpetual shareholders.”
