STEPHEN CRANSTON: Let the black stars shine
Though many BEE managers are quite new, their investment professionals have established records
In spite of some of the largest SA pension funds’ support, black economic empowerment managers still battle to achieve critical mass. In the private sector, institutional market trustees demand well-known names, and brands are even more critical in the unit trust market.
Though I look at managers quite regularly, I wouldn’t consider Balondolozi, Benguela or Mianzo to be top-of-mind brands. Argon is better known in the industry thanks to the flamboyance of its former boss, Mothobi Seseli, but that’s not quite enough to confer brand status. Even the more established businesses are barely known to the retail public. Taquanta is the Intel inside most of the Nedgroup fixed interest funds, but it is buried quite deep inside.
Kagiso has its own funds, and for years its Equity Alpha fund was the best in SA. Yet its assets are predominantly in pension funds. Sadly, the retail market is still controlled by a closed shop of predominantly white advisers who are reluctant to move out of their comfort zone of Coronation, Investec, Foord and Allan Gray. Even other "white" businesses such as Sanlam, Old Mutual and Stanlib have been ignored. Though many BEE managers are quite new, their investment professionals have established records. Asief Mohamed was one of a quartet of early black fund managers in the 1980s, along with Shams Pather (who has not done too badly as chairman of Coronation), Imtiaz Ahmed, who switched to hedge funds, and Adam Ebrahim, who runs Oasis, the institutional balanced market’s most competitive BEE manager. Oasis refuses to participate in the Alexander Forbes and 27four BEE surveys. The BEE manager universe is seen to have the same kind of relationship to the mainstream managers that Alt-X...
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