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CofE creates investment director post

Finance | Tania Mason | 7 Apr 2009

The Church Commissioners for England have begun interviewing for the new position of director of investment, to manage all of the Church of England’s property and other assets worth a total of £5.67bn.

The new director will join the senior management team under chief executive Andrew Brown (pictured), and will report to the assets committee. He or she will take responsibility for advising the committee on the strategic development of the multi-asset investment portfolio.

Brown said the decision to create such a role followed an increasingly popular trend already embraced by the Cambridge and Oxford College Funds, several US endowment funds, and the Wellcome Trust and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Short-selling condemned

Last year the Archbishop of Canterbury publicly condemned the use of short-selling (borrowing shares and selling them on, in the hope of buying them back at a cheaper price later), prompting some hedge funds to accuse the Commissioners of hypocrisy, saying that it had indulged in the practice itself. The Church denied it had.

And only last month the Archbishop warned that God would not save humanity from the effects of climate change.

But Brown denied that the creation of the new post had been prompted by orders from above to improve the ethics or sustainability of the Church’s investments. “The Archbishops’ Council has long been concerned about climate change and environmental issues – there’s no change there,” Brown told Charity News Alert. “This is more about responding to the increasing complexity and development of capital markets.”

For instance, he said, the Commissioners had recently invested £50m in a Real Estate Investment Trust portfolio and found it hard to decide whether this should be managed by the securities team or the property team.

“We have very able teams for both but we want somebody to provide an overview and give us the strength and depth from new investment opportunities, and to co-ordinate these opportunities together.”

Exisiting positions to remain

The two existing positions of chief surveyor and chief investment officer will remain, and will report to the new post.

The last audited total value of the Commissioners’ property and investment assets was £4.80bn, as at 31 December 2007. 2008 figures are not available yet.

The charity achieved a 9.5 per cent average return over the last decade, placing it in the top 2 per cent of charity funds for the decade.

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