People moves: First Sentier appoints Durham ESG director

Aviva Investors, Triple Point Investment Management, SSE, Macquarie Capital, Montagu, M&G Real Estate, Straits Real Estate, Barings, Savills, Nuveen Real Estate, Cbus Super, AustralianSuper

First Sentier Investors – Sophie Durham has joined the London team in the newly-created role of ESG director. Durham will also lead the coordination of ESG due diligence around transactions, investor engagement on ESG issues and reporting, and will support the implementation of ESG best practice in all companies across the portfolio. She joins the company following five years at Kosmos Energy where she was responsible for climate change and global public policy. Ilona Kriksciunaite also recently joined the London team as executive. Kriksciunaite joins following five years at Nuveen Real Estate, where she was finance manager for Nuveen’s UK real estate fund, involving all aspects of fund finance. Moritz Lindhorst joined in November 2020 as senior executive, based in London. Lindhorst spent four years at CPPIB where he was a member of the infrastructure and European credit teams and before that, was a member of the transport and infrastructure group at Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division.

Cbus Super – John Longo has been appointed head of property. For the past four years, Longo was a senior investment director at AustralianSuper. Before that, he was the property director at the Future Fund for five years. His past experience includes managing listed property securities portfolios at Challenger, an Australian financial services group and the Australian division of the global bank, HSBC. The super fund has also appointed Serge Allaire as the head of private equity and James Crawford as the new head of equity portfolio construction.

Aviva Investors – Charles Herriott and Andrea Pelizzari have joined the global asset manager’s infrastructure equity team as associate director and associate respectively. Herriott will be part of the asset management team within Aviva Investors’ Infrastructure Equity business. Pelizzari joins Aviva Investors’ origination team and will provide financial modelling and analysis, as well as supporting in deal origination activities. Prior to joining Aviva Investors, Herriott was senior asset manager at Triple Point Investment Management. He has also worked at Ancala Partners, DIF Management Capital Partners, Amber Infrastructure and Ernst & Young. Pelizzari joins from SSE, where he worked in the corporate finance team that supported the distributed energy division of the company. Earlier in his career, Pelizzari worked for a clean technology start-up and was also part of the Detector Technologies group at CERN.

Barings – The real estate manager has named Jürgen Schmid head of acquisition and sourcing and appointed him to the German management board. Schmid will be responsible for deal sourcing across Germany as well as property acquisitions for the existing core, value-add and opportunistic strategies. Together with the transaction management department headed by Nikolas von Kleist, the newly established acquisition and sourcing division will bundle all German transaction activities. Schmid joins from Savills in Frankfurt, where he has been responsible for the regional investment business as director of investment since 2013. Before that, he held various positions at Deka Immobilien, Tishman Speyer and the Freo Group.

Macquarie Capital – Ramzi Moubarak has been appointed managing director, to strengthen the firm’s investment capabilities in infrastructure projects and companies in Europe. Based in London, Moubarak joins Macquarie Capital from European private equity firm Montagu, where he was a partner and co-led the firm’s infrastructure business. Prior to joining Montagu in 2018, Moubarak spent eight years at Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, leading investments in a broad range of sectors across Europe, including energy, transport, and digital infrastructure. The appointment marks the return of Moubarak to Macquarie Group, having begun his professional career with Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets over a decade ago.

M&G Real Estate – Lai Jing Dong has been promoted to CIO and interim CEO, Asia. Lai has been M&G’ head of acquisitions, Asia since October 2016. In March 2019, he took on an additional role as head of M&G Real Estate Japan. He has also taken the lead on investing on behalf of M&G’s value-add mandate which was established in June 2019. Prior to joining M&G, Lai was director and head of investments at Straits Real Estate, where he managed an Asia Pacific investment mandate across multiple asset classes.  Lai has also previously held senior positions at Goldman Sachs’ real estate principal investment area in Japan and Singapore, and Carlyle Asia Real Estate Partners in Hong Kong.