Bart Turtelboom and Karim Abdel-Motaal, the joint heads of GLG’s emerging markets business, are no strangers to crises. Both men have been trading and investing in emerging markets since the mid-1990s – starting their careers in a decade marked by the Mexican ‘Tequila’ meltdown and the Asian/Russian debt debacles.
Bart Turtelboom and Karim Abdel-Motaal
So they understand better than most that turbulence goes with the territory. But even those previous baptisms of fire could not have fully prepared them for what lay in store for them in September 2008, as they arrived from Morgan Stanley to take over the GLG emerging markets business in the wake of the high-profile departure of Greg Coffey and his team.
Not only did they find themselves facing the task of completely rebuilding and repositioning a once stellar-performing business at GLG that had gone in months from $7 billion of assets at its peak...