KAUST’s Edgar Nehme Said to Leave for a Bass Family Office

Edgar Nehme is leaving KAUST Investment Management Company to become chief investment officer at a Robert Bass family office, according to a person familiar with his plans.

Nehme didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did a representative from Oak Hill Capital Partners, one of Bass’ family offices.

Bass has a net worth of about $4 billion, according to Forbes, which says he built his fortune off an inheritance from his oil tycoon uncle Sid Richardson. Texas billionaire Bass and his family have multiple offices, the best known being Oak Hill, which began investing in 1986. He also co-founded Acadia Investment Management in 2013, with Mark Anson. Anson was CIO of the Bass family office until he left to become CIO of Commonfund, an asset manager in Connecticut that assists non-profit organizations, in January 2016.

Institutional Investor could not immediately confirm which Bass family outpost Nehme will lead as CIO.

Nehme joined KAUST, which manages the endowment of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in 2010. The research university opened in 2009 with a $10 billion endowment, according to an NPR report at the time. The endowment was set up with a grant from King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the former King of Saudi Arabia, who died in 2015. In his 2016 book, ‘Out of the Desert: My Journey From Nomadic Bedouin to the Heart of Global Oil,’ author Ali Al-Naimi, the former Saudi oil minister, described how he persuaded the King to double his initial allocation to the university endowment to $20 billion.

Prior to joining KAUST, Nehme, 45, was a managing director at Crestline Investors, an alternative-investment firm in Texas, for about five months, according to his LinkedIn bio. Before that, he was head of credit and event strategies at UBP from March 2008 to March 2010.