Tiburon Partners has been awarded the contract to manage the Formosa Growth Fund, a fund established in 1991 to invest in Taiwanese securities and listed on the Irish stock Exchange. The mandate comes a few months after Tiburon set up its own in-house Asian long short hedge fund, called Tiburon Tiger.
"Our focus will be directed at restoring the track record of The Formosa Growth Fund so that, despite market liberalisation, it increasingly becomes the vehicle of choice for institutional investors wishing to invest in Taiwan," says Mark Martyrossian, partner at Tiburon Partners. The mandate was given after a competitive tender process. It is unclear who else was bidding for the fund and what the actual size of the mandate is.
The fund will be managed by Mark Fleming who joined Tiburon earlier this year from British Airways, where he was the head of the international equity departments of the airline's pension fund. During his time at BA he earned the company excellent returns, being in the top 1% of over 2000 similar funds over one, three and ten years.
Tiburon Partners was established in 1999 by Martyrossian and Richard Pell-Ilderton, who had both been involved in Asian equity markets for the previous 16 years at a number of international equity houses operating in the region. The firm is headquartered in St James' in London, where the vast majority of UK based hedge funds are now based. It is named after a small town in Northern California, where the partners were travelling through when they decided to take the plunge in the world of hedge funds.
