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Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel has hired Nabeel Bhanji, a long-standing London-based portfolio manager at Elliott Management who worked on some of the activist hedge fund’s most high-profile campaigns.
Bhanji, who worked at Elliott for more than a decade and was one of 11 equity partners globally, is expected to have management responsibilities at Citadel in addition to an investment role, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Citadel and Elliott declined to comment.
The move is the latest and most significant departure from Elliott’s London office, which has suffered a string of senior exits in the past few years. Paul Singer’s $70bn hedge fund, which is based in New York, had only made Bhanji an equity partner in the past year.
Bhanji was in charge of some of Elliott’s biggest activist positions in recent years, including at London-listed mining group Anglo American and Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank.
His is the latest departure from Elliott’s main European office, which is led by Gordon Singer, the son of Elliott’s 80-year-old founder Paul Singer.
Other London exits have included head trader James Bayliss and portfolio manager Sebastien de La Riviere, who left in 2023, and portfolio managers Mark Levine, Mark Wills and Giorgio Furlani in 2022.
Citadel runs $64bn in assets under management and, since it was founded in 1990, has grown into the most profitable investment company in the industry’s history.
Citadel, together with Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management, is a pioneer of the multi-manager sector, the fastest-growing and most lucrative corner of the $4.5tn hedge fund industry.
Multi-manager hedge funds house dozens of trading teams, known as “pods”, which trade a range of strategies across equities, commodities, foreign exchange, credit and other markets.
In the first 10 months of this year, Citadel’s flagship hedge fund Wellington has gained 11.2 per cent, according to investors. Its tactical trading fund is up 18 per cent, the equities fund has gained 13 per cent and its fixed income fund is up 5.4 per cent, investors said.
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