- Eyes leveraged credit, special situations and structured credit
- Exec committee has some of Europe’s most experienced names
- 16-year GS veteran building CLO presence in US
Cairn Capital has rebranded as Polus Capital Management after its takeover of Bybrook Capital last year formed a $9bn credit manager.
The London-based firm focuses on leveraged credit, special situations and structured credit. It has a team of over 30 investment professionals and a New York office.
Polus, an independently-managed unit of Italian group Mediobanca, boasts some of London’s leading hedge fund professionals on its executive management committee:
- Nicholas Chalmers, CEO, spent two years at Cairn before the deal last year and was previously CEO and president at event-driven firm Oceanwood.
- Andrew Burke, CIO of leveraged credit, has been with Cairn, which launched in 2004, since 2006. He previously worked at Harbourmaster Capital and JP Morgan.
- Robert Dafforn, CIO of opportunistic credit, founded Bybrook in 2014 and previously worked at Eton Park and Millennium.
- Glen Mifsud, president, was CEO of Bybrook and previously co-president at Capula Investment Management and a managing director at Credit Suisse.
Polus recently appointed David Kim, who spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs, as head of US leveraged credit to build a CLO/loan platform. Loic Prevot was promoted to head Polus’s established leveraged credit business in Europe.
“We have already seen the benefits of the merger and we are building tangible momentum across the business to attract some of the world’s highest-quality investors,” said Chalmers in a statement on Thursday.
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