Citadel LLC will hire 17 portfolio managers from hedge fund manager Visium Asset Management for its fourth and newest equity strategy, Aptigon Capital.
Richard Schimel joined Chicago-based Citadel earlier this month with a mandate to build a multisector global equity hedge fund team to staff Aptigon, said Katie Spring, a Citadel spokeswoman.
Most of the portfolio managers who will join Citadel's Aptigon business on Aug. 8 now manage the $1.6 billion Visium Global Fund, a long/short global equity hedge fund. The team likely will start trading toward the end of the third quarter. The new strategy will be used exclusively in Citadel's flagship Kensington and Wellington multistrategy hedge funds.
Ms. Spring said names of the new Aptigon portfolio managers aren't available yet.
Jacob J. Gottlieb, Visium's managing partner and chief investment officer, told investors in a June 17 letter obtained by Pensions & Investments that the firm would close and its funds would be wound down or sold after insider-trading charges were leveled against three employees in mid-June.
Visium said in a July 19 notice to the New York Department of Labor that it will lay off 33 of its 110 employees beginning as early as October, Bloomberg reported.
AllianceBernstein signed a letter of intent to assume management of the fund on June 17 and noted in a news release that the fund's investment team and some support staff would become AB employees.
Jonathan Freedman, an AB spokesman, and Jonathan Gasthalter, a Visium spokesman, declined to comment.
On June 15, two Visium employees were charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission in civil suits, according to an SEC news release. One of the two and a third defendant were charged with falsely inflating the value of securities in one of Visium's hedge funds.
Sanjay Valvani, a Visium partner and portfolio manager among those charged by the SEC, was found dead June 20 in an apparent suicide. n
Bloomberg contributed to this story.
