First, it tried and failed to convince Janus’s former parent, Stilwell Financial, to sell the reeling money manager outright rather than spin it off into a publicly traded entity. Now the Harvard-bankrolled Highfields, which owns 9 percent of Janus, wants the fund company to reveal the compensation packages of its top portfolio managers. Highfields contends that they are grossly overpaid given Janus’s recent dismal performance: At the end of March, Janus assets stood at $133 billion, down from a peak of $330 billion in March 2000.
Some of Highfields’ targets are leaving: Warren Lammert, 41, lead manager on the $5 billion Janus Mercury fund, announced in February that he planned to start a hedge fund. Last month Helen Young Hayes, 40, CIO and co-manager of the Janus Worldwide and Janus Overseas funds, which have a combined $22 billion in assets, said she would retire in June. Lammert, Hayes and Scott Schoelzel -- another Highfields target, who is still manager of the $9 billion Janus 20 fund -- are believed to have earned more than $10 million each last year; Hayes, some say, may have pocketed as much as $30 million.
Janus, which is in the midst of a turnaround effort, denies forcing anyone out. In an April 29 conference call with Wall Street analysts, CFO Loren Starr declared that “nobody was asked to leave.”
So why the departures? Sources say that Janus portfolio managers do not want people in and around the firm’s home base of Denver -- many of whom got burned investing in Janus funds -- to know what they earn. In recent years some residents of Cherry Hills Village, a posh suburb where many company executives have built lavish homes, have resented the influx of Janus money. “These people do not want this information coming out,” one source says.
Hayes declines to comment. In a letter to clients last month, she admitted that “the timing of my retirement may seem unexpected given the fact that we may be in the final chapters of one of the most challenging market environments in history.” But she did not say why she is retiring. A neighbor of Hayes’s says that she has four young children and that this figured in her decision. Hayes’s husband is a stay-at-home dad.
