What does Don Phillips have against the Investment Company Institute? Nothing, says the No. 2 executive at mutual fund researcher Morningstar, who last month skipped the ICI’s annual confab in Washington for the second straight year, prompting attendees to speculate that he was boycotting the event. Phillips, 42, is an industry scold who has taken shots at the fund industry’s main lobbying group. Last year he publicly chided ICI chairman Paul Haaga for complaining that a biased media published everything fund critics like Vanguard founder Jack Bogle had to say while ignoring ICI studies and press releases. “The ICI has bigger problems than being outsoundbit by Jack Bogle,” declared Phillips, who, friends say, has privately voiced dismay over the ICI’s presentation of itself as the representative of fund shareholders. “His beef is that the ICI is a corporate lobby and that Morningstar is the real shareholder organization,” says one fund industry veteran who knows Phillips well. Phillips, Morningstar’s best-known personality, insists that he missed the May ICI meeting because of a scheduling conflict -- he was speaking at a meeting of the Orange County, California, chapter of the Financial Planning Association. “I think the ICI might have done some things differently in the past year, but I do have a lot of faith in the ICI as an institution, and I think they have a real chance to be proactive under new leader Paul Stevens,” Phillips says. Stevens, who was ICI’s general counsel in the mid-1990s and, more recently, a partner at Washington law firm Dechert, on June 1 succeeded Matthew Fink as ICI president, the group’s top day-to-day management job.
