Querying the Bill

4 March 2016 By Neil Unmack Follow @unmack1

The bank gave new boss Bill Winters 6 mln pounds to buy him out of hedge fund Renshaw Bay. Yet that’s hard to square with the now-known price at which the fund’s main business was later sold. Standard Chartered’s numbers may still add up, but investors can only guess.

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GAM Holding disclosed on March 1 that it had pledged to pay 15.7 million Swiss francs for Renshaw Bay, a UK-based asset manager set up by current Standard Chartered boss Bill Winters, in a deal that took place in October.

StanChart awarded Winters 899,031 shares to compensate him for his stake in Renshaw Bay, in which he forfeited his interest, it reported on Sept. 23. Winters joined the UK-headquartered bank in May 2015.

The payment by GAM for the real-estate debt part of Renshaw Bay was split between an 11 million Swiss franc cash consideration and 4.7 million francs in a contingent payment to be settled over five years.

Winters owned about 30 percent of the group, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Standard Charted said in a statement: “Standard Chartered undertook a thorough process to quantify the value of the entirety of Bill’s interests in the Renshaw Bay that he forfeited upon joining the Bank, and prior to the sale of a portion of the business to GAM. As a result of the valuation process, we are clear that the compensation of £6.5m was substantially less than the value of the interests forfeited at the time.”

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