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About eight staff members who made up the London team were
recently told to move to the Battery Park City headquarters of
Goldman Sach Group Inc <GS.N> in lower Manhattan or find a new
job internally, the sources said.
A Goldman spokesman confirmed the move but not the details,
adding that the reasons for the staff shift were not related to
Brexit.
"This is a discrete decision for reasons specific to GSIP, one
investment team within Goldman Sachs, and shouldn’t be construed
as anything but that," he said.
The move was triggered by managing director Nick Advani, who led
the hedge fund's London operations, the sources said. He said in
June he would be stepping down from his role, they said,
requesting anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to
the media.
Advani, now an advisory director at Goldman, did not respond to
requests for comment. Advani is expected to leave the firm later
this year, the sources said.
Managing director Raluca Ragab, who had been formally leading
the London-based team since Advani's departure, will also leave
Goldman once the move is complete, one of the sources said.
Ragab's departure is for personal reasons, one of the sources
added.
Multi-strategy hedge fund GSIP launched in November 2008 with $7
billion in assets, one of the largest hedge fund launches at the
time. GSIP, run globally by co-heads Raanan Agus and Kenneth
Eberts, sits within Goldman's asset management division.
But a focus on value investing with around 20 positions mainly
in equities became more challenging in recent years, a former
employee told Reuters.
GSIP's Global Long Short Partners Offshore fund posted losses of
8.2 percent in the year to end-September in 2016 after small
gains of 1.5 percent in 2015, according to an investor letter
reviewed by Reuters.
Last September, three of the fund's top five credit positions
were in the Europe Middle East and Africa region, according to
the letter.
GSIP's assets fell in 2014 after Goldman pulled out $2.8 billion
in response to the U.S. Dodd-Frank financial reform law and the
Volcker rule, which restricted banks' proprietary trading. The
fund now manages around $3.5 billion.
Separately, Goldman may move up to 1,000 staff out of London in
response to Britain's vote to leave the European Union, it was
reported last month.
(Reporting by Maiya Keidan in London and Olivia Oran ia New
York, additional reporting by Carolyn Cohn and Simon Jessop;
Editing by Tom Brown and David Gregorio)
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