Gottex Fund Management Holdings, an independent global alternative asset management group, today announced that Gottex and FrontPoint Partners will form a new direct lending venture, providing access for Gottex’s clients to the direct lending sector. Steve Czech will join FrontPoint and will be located in Greenwich, Connecticut. He will manage the FrontPoint Direct Lending strategy and a customised Gottex Direct Lending strategy. The strategy is based on making secured loans to US and European middle market companies.

A Brooklyn school dean was accused of trying to extort a hedge fund out of $4m by claiming he could prevent a federal inmate from telling investigators about alleged insider trades by the unidentified fund. Rabbi Milton Balkany was arrested yesterday after he accepted two checks from the fund totaling $3.25m, US Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said in a statement. Balkany is charged with wire fraud, extortion, blackmail and making false statements, and he faces as long as 20 years in prison if convicted on the wire fraud charge, according to the statement.
 
The market for sovereign credit default swaps needs to be regulated more firmly, French finance minister Christine Lagarde said Thursday, adding that speculation is partly to blame for the eurozone's current debt troubles, the WSJ reports. Spreads on sovereign credit default swaps – which provide a kind of insurance against government default – recently have faced scrutiny in the eurozone. That's because burgeoning budget deficits are fueling fears that Greece or another country could wipe out its creditors.

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Allstate Corp said yesterday that it hired former Soros Fund Management risk manager Peruvemba Satish to oversee risks in the auto insurer $100bn investment portfolio that suffered big losses during the financial crisis, the WSJ reports. Satish will be managing director and chief risk officer, investments at Allstate. Satish has roughly a decade of risk-management experience in the hedge fund industry. He was most recently chief risk officer at Jamison Capital Partners.
 
Principal Investment Management, the private client investment management specialist, announced today the appointment of Stephen Jones as its new chief investment officer. Stephen will join Principal in mid-April after a 15-year career with Gartmore Investment Management where he was head of european equities and previously served as a board director. Prior to joining Gartmore, Stephen worked for the Prudential Group, including seven years as a fund manager.
 
Matthew Feargrieve has left law firm Mourant and will be joining Appleby as joint managing partner of their Zurich office. He shall be responsible for the investment funds and corporate finance practice in that office, while working in conjunction with Appleby's London office to provide offshore legal services to fund managers in the UK, Switzerland and globally. Appleby is one of the top four global offshore law firms, and enjoys a high brand profile for Cayman hedge funds.