Pimco Hires Devir After He Took Harvard Endowment Position
July 12, 2011, 3:54 PM EDTBy Gillian Wee and Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam
(Adds Pimco’s expansion into stocks in ninth paragraph.)
July 12 (Bloomberg) -- Pacific Investment Management Co., the manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, hired John Devir for its credit-analyst team, after he accepted a position as a managing director at Harvard University’s endowment.
Devir has joined Pimco as an executive vice president, Mark Porterfield, a spokesman for the Newport Beach, California, fund company, confirmed yesterday in an e-mail. Devir was set to begin this month at Harvard Management Co., where he would have been in charge of developed-market stocks at the world’s richest school, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university said in May.
Pimco Chief Executive Officer Mohamed El-Erian, who led the Harvard endowment from February 2006 to December 2007, is adding executives as he expands the firm’s lineup of funds. Jane Mendillo, El-Erian’s successor at Harvard, took over the endowment in July 2008, two months before the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy roiled equity markets, causing the school’s investments to plunge a record 27 percent.
Devir didn’t return a call yesterday seeking comment. John Longbrake, a spokesman for Harvard, said the endowment was told Devir “would no longer be joining the investment team.”
At Harvard, Devir would have reported to Stephen Blyth, head of internal management, who, along with Mendillo, has overseen an expansion of in-house managers at the $27.6 billion endowment.
Devir, a graduate of Siena College in Loudonville, New York, was managing director and head of equity strategies at Barclays Capital Inc., and previously, he spent three years in a similar role at Lehman Brothers. Before that, he was director of U.S. and European equity proprietary trading at Credit Suisse First Boston, according to Harvard’s May statement.
Taborsky, Seidner
Since El-Erian joined Pimco for the second time in January 2008, the company hired Mark Taborsky, who previously oversaw the endowment’s external managers, that year and Marc Seidner, formerly the school’s head of U.S. fixed-income investing, in 2009. El-Erian is also Pimco’s co-investment chief.
The $243 billion Pimco Total Return Fund is the world’s largest mutual fund.
Pimco, synonymous with bond investing since it was co- founded by Bill Gross four decades ago, said in 2009 it would push into equities, and hired Neel Kashkari, a former U.S. Treasury official, to direct the effort. Since then, the firm has hired portfolio managers from Franklin Resources Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and others to start stock mutual funds.
Harvard appointed Rene Canezin, also from Barclays, in January as managing director of its portfolio-management team to lead investments in debt, and in April it named Satu Parikh of RBS Sempra Commodities LLP to head commodities investments.
Harvard’s fund climbed 11 percent in the year ended June 30, 2010, beating its own benchmark while trailing the median 13 percent gain of institutional funds, including public and corporate pensions, endowments and foundations, tracked by Wilshire Associates, a consulting firm in Santa Monica, California.
--Editors: Josh Friedman, Christian Baumgaertel
To contact the reporters on this story: Gillian Wee in New York at gwee3@bloomberg.net; Sree Bhaktavatsalam in Boston at sbhaktavatsa@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christian Baumgaertel at cbaumgaertel@bloomberg.net
