New York City Comptroller John Liu, who campaigned last year promising “full accountability and transparency,” has refused to disclose the identities of some of the money managers fired by the city's $103 billion pension funds.
In an April speech to business leaders, Mr. Liu said he dismissed six managers for “poor performance.” He refused to identify them all, even after Bloomberg News sought their names under the state's Freedom of Information Law. Mr. Liu didn't want to embarrass them, said his spokeswoman, Sharon Lee.
“The intent was not to say X, Y and Z are awful and incompetent,” Mr. Liu said in a July 15 interview. “The intent was that we are reviewing the portfolio to identify poor performance and we are taking action. Does that mean we should go out and start excoriating individual fund managers?”
While Mr. Liu said in the interview that he would comply with the request to release the names, he didn't say when they'd be made available.
“We haven't decided not to disclose,” he said. “The operative term is that you haven't gotten it yet.”
In an e-mail sent July 20, Ms. Lee said the office intends to answer the freedom-of-information request by Sept. 15. “We intend to fully honor the comptroller's commitment,” she wrote.
On July 21, Mr. Liu’s office disclosed that Acadian Asset Management, which managed $646 million for three New York City pension funds, was one of six investment advisers dismissed for “poor performance.”
Mr. Liu’s office said it terminated Acadian, whose investments for New York City included Greek stocks, for “underperformance relative to the market.”
The order to Acadian, which was hired in July 2007, says assets managed by the firm “were transitioned to other investment managers” this month.
A voice mail for Churchill Franklin, Acadian’s COO, wasn’t immediately returned.
One of five tax dollars collected by New York City, about $7.6 billion, will go into the city's five public pension funds this year. That's more than 10% of the city's $63 billion budget and more than it costs to operate the police or fire departments.
City officials project the cost to the municipal budget of pensions covering more than 581,000 current and former police officers, firefighters, teachers, civilian employees and school administrators to increase to $7.8 billion in 2012, from $1.3 billion in 2002.