Hedge Fund News: Marc Lasry, Ken Griffin, Nelson Peltz

Hedge Fund Engaged Capital Seeks to Replace Three Rovi Directors (Reuters)
Engaged Capital LLC has written to Rovi Corp, which sells television guide programs to cable providers, seeking changes to the company’s board. Engaged Capital, which owns a 0.49 percent stake in Rovi, is seeking to replace three of Rovi’s long-term directors, Andrew Ludwick, James Meyer and James O’Shaughnessy. Engaged Capital nominated David Lockwood, Raghavendra Rau and Glenn Welling for election to the board at the next annual meeting, scheduled for May 13. “We believe the incumbent board displays all the hallmarks of a broken and unaccountable governance structure,” the hedge fund said.

Former Top Financial Regulator Worked at Collapsed Hedge Fund Heather Capital (The Wall Street Journal)
A former top financial regulator who wrote a book on corporate governance worked as a director of Heather Capital, the $600 million hedge fund whose collapse has sparked a police investigation. John Bourbon, a former managing director of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority and head of supervision at the Isle of Man Financial Supervision Commission, was a director of Isle of Man-based Heather from 2006 onward, according to corporate filings. He also worked as a director of Aarkad, the main fund that fed money into Heather.

Small Hedge Funds Get Bigger Share of Investors’ Money (The Wall Street Journal)
Hedge-fund upstarts attracted as much money as the titans of the industry last year, a shift for investors who have long favored larger firms. Managers with assets of less than $5 billion took in roughly half of the $76.4 billion committed to hedge funds after collecting 37% of new capital invested in 2013. That reversed an imbalance of the previous four years, when investors put $93 billion into larger funds while pulling $63 billion from small and mid-size funds, according to data collected for The Wall Street Journal by HFR Inc., which first started tracking the flows in 2009.

Blackstone’s First-Quarter Earnings Soar On Asset Sales (Reuters)
Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, said on Thursday that its first-quarter profit doubled from a year ago, as strong asset sales generated by its private equity and real estate units brought in record cash. For the second quarter in a row, private equity overtook real estate as Blackstone’s biggest earnings driver, thanks to the sale of shares in companies such as Catalent Inc, Pinnacle Foods and Michaels Companies Inc.