Francois Barthelemy of F&C Partners has tried to put a more human, and sympathetic, face on hedge funds. Responding to a comment made last week by Dutch minister Joop Wijn who, like others before him, referred to hedge funds as “locusts,” Barthelemy called such a characterization as “misguided,” and for reasons perhaps not previously cited. Usually, activist hedge funds defend their right to insinuate themselves into company business as their moral right as investors. Indeed, he said, “The corporate structure of hedge funds means that they have the freedom to raise their voice in the face of incompetent management teams.” Then Barthelemy also reminded Dutchy something that all hedgies should bear in mind whenever they’re portrayed in a negative light: that hedge funds are no longer the just the financial sandbox of the wealthy few, but increasingly the domain of big institutional investors who represent all the little folks. He noted that HFs are working “primarily on behalf of those who invest their life savings in order to pay for their retirement, a better school for their grandchildren, or the holiday of a lifetime.” Such sentiment appears to have been lost on FNV Bondgeneoten, the Netherlands’ largest labor union. According to Investment & Pensions Europe, FNV is calling for new rules regulating pension fund investment in hedge funds, because as it stands, the funds appear to give short shrift to the down side of HFs. “Hedge funds are causing a lot of unrest,” FNV Chairman Henk van der Kolk told Het Financieele Dagblad. “Their only goal seems to be to make the largest possible return within the shortest time, by buying, splitting and selling companies or parts of them.” To that, Thisj Stegers, a spokesman for civil service pension fund ABP, responded, “There are a lot of misunderstandings about hedge funds. They follow a wide range of strategies, which you can’t lump together.”
