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Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel has hired Nabeel Bhanji, a long-standing London-based portfolio manager at Elliott Management who worked on some of the activist hedge fund’s most high-profile international campaigns.
Bhanji, who was an equity partner at Elliott and worked there for more than a decade, was set to take a global leadership position at Citadel and an investment role, according to two people familiar with the situation.
Citadel and Elliott declined to comment.
The move is the latest and most significant departure from Elliott’s London office, which has suffered a number of senior exits in the past few years.
The $70bn Florida-based hedge fund had only made Bhanji, 38, an equity partner in the past year, and he was widely seen as one of a new generation of homegrown stars within the firm.
He played a leading role in some of Elliott’s biggest activist positions in recent years, including at London-listed mining group Anglo American and Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank.
The firm’s London office serves as its main international outpost and is led by Gordon Singer, the son of the firm’s 80-year-old founder Paul Singer.
But there have been a series of high-profile exits from the office in 2022 and 2023, including head trader James Bayliss and portfolio manager Sebastien de La Riviere last year, and portfolio managers Mark Levine, Mark Wills and Giorgio Furlani the year before.
Bhanji’s exit, which was announced in an internal memo on Monday, came as a surprise to Elliott employees, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Paul Singer and Jonathan Pollock, co-chief executives, said in the memo: “We appreciate [Nabeel’s] years of service and important contributions to the firm. We have transitioned Nabeel’s managerial and investment responsibilities to other members of the team.”
Elliott also said in the memo that New York-based portfolio manager Samantha Algaze had been made an equity partner, making her the first female partner in its history.
Elliott now has 14 equity partners, up from 11 when Bhanji was made a partner. Two other equity partners, John Pike and Pat Frayne, were also promoted to its management committee.
Citadel, together with Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management, is a pioneer of the multi-manager sector, the fastest-growing and most lucrative corner of the $4.5tn hedge fund industry.
Citadel runs $64bn in assets under management and, since it was founded in 1990, has grown into the most profitable investment company in the industry’s history.
Multi-manager hedge funds house dozens of trading teams, known as “pods”, which trade a range of strategies across equities, commodities, foreign exchange, credit and other markets.
In the first 10 months of this year, Citadel’s flagship hedge fund Wellington gained 11.2 per cent, according to investors. Its tactical trading fund is up 18 per cent, the equities fund has gained 13 per cent and its fixed income fund is up 5.4 per cent, investors said.
