Hermitage Capital Management
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Hermitage Capital Management is an investment fund and asset management company specializing in Russian markets.
Its investment arm, Hermitage Fund was founded in 1996 by William Browder and Edmond Safra. It has been extremely successful, earning 1,610% in its first eleven years of operation. It has been ranked the World’s Best Performing Emerging Markets Fund over the 1996-2001 five-year period by Nelsons.
Hermitage is an activist fund. One of its main tactics is to expose corporate corruption in the companies it is holding, in the hope of improving managerial behaviour and lessen the significant discount that corruption has on share prices. Most famously, Hermitage has helped to expose several high-profile cases of corruption in Russia's largest company Gazprom between 1998 and 2000. In October 2000, Hermitage reported that "investors are valuing this company as if 99 percent of its assets have been stolen. The real figure is around 10 percent so that's good news".
In April 2007 the firm launched Hermitage Global, an activist fund focused on global emerging markets.
[edit] References
- "Gazprom and Hermitage Capital: Shareholder Activism in Russia", Stanford Graduate School of Business Case IB-36, 2002
