Hedge funds get a new cop
Memo to London's hedge fund managers: There is a new supervisor in town.
The UK's financial regulator has hired Australian Andrew Crain to head up the team that oversees the roughly 40 largest hedge fund managers that operate in the UK. Crain, a former regulator in his home country, assumes his new job later this month. The team he will run sits within the wholesale investment division of the Financial Services Authority, the UK's equivalent of the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The appointment comes as the UK regulator is stepping up efforts to discourage unsavoury behaviour, including insider trading and other market abuses by hedge funds and others. Those efforts have included measures that are widely unpopular among fund managers, including a rapidly introduced rule requiring disclosure of short positions -- or bets that a stock will fall -- in certain circumstances.
Crain, 39 years old, hasn't worked at a hedge fund but was a trader and risk manager at several large investment banks in Australia, including Citigroup and BNP Paribas. As a regulator in Australia, he oversaw the exchange-traded markets and worked on some insider trading investigations.
In an interview, Crain described his approach as "consultative," adding he hoped to help the hedge fund industry understand the regulator's point of view as well as to listen to fund managers' views on "where they see the tensions are."
-- from Letter from the City, send comments to cityletter@wsj.com
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