Bo Foged is leaving his job as chief executive officer of Denmark’s biggest pension fund ATP to join Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), becoming the third CEO to quit the statutory pensions giant in just seven years – and the second high-profile Danish pensions chief to quit within a week.
Hillerød-based ATP announced this morning that Foged, who has worked at ATP since 2015 and been its CEO since June 2019, would step down from the top role by this summer, before moving on to become a partner at CIP. The DKK927.5bn (€124.7bn) pension fund said its board of directors had already initiated an external recruitment process to find a new CEO.
Foged said in ATP’s statement: “It has been an incredibly difficult decision to say goodbye to ATP, which is a unique institution.”
He added that he had no doubt that the firm’s employees had a “special awareness” of the social responsibility it carried, which enabled it to create “unique results.”
Since its long-term CEO Lars Rohde – now the governor of the country’s central bank – left in 2013, ATP has now seen three CEOs come and go, beginning with Rohde’s successor Carsten Stendevad who left at the end of 2016.
Foged took up the role of acting CEO in November 2018, replacing Stendevad’s successor Christian Hyldahl.
The latter had resigned suddenly amid intense pressure from politicians following revelations linking his previous work at Nordea to the so-called ‘Cum-Ex’ tax scandal.
Foged initially ruled himself out as the next permanent CEO of ATP, saying the role was a very public one and that he really enjoyed his private life.
However, he changed his mind and was appointed as permanent CEO in June the following year.
Foged said in this morning’s announcement that ATP had now had several years of strong financial results, and had set the direction for its climate ambitions, aiming to reach DKK100bn (€13.4bn) in green investments by 2025.
He concluded by saying ATP was well-equipped for the future.
In its 2021 results released last week, ATP announced it was making its largest-ever increase in pensions, ramping them up by 4% at the beginning of this year.
Torben Andersen, chair of ATP’s board of directors, said: “Bo has been brilliant at spearheading the great process of change that ATP is going through.
“A clear strategic direction has been set, where the results have been among the best in ATP’s history, at the same time as considerably raising its level of social responsibility,” he added.
Meanwhile, CIP, the energy infrastructure fund manager co-founded by PensionDanmark 10 years ago, said Foged would start as partner and chief financial officer at the company by 1 July at the latest.
“As CFO Bo will have the responsibility for finance, tax, IT, treasury, risk, fund performance and financial modelling,” the firm said.
News of his departure from ATP comes just days after the announcement that Allan Polack, the CEO of Denmark’s second-largest pensions firm, PFA, is to leave his job.
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