Wellington, Nov 14 NZPA - Simon Botherway and Paul Glass, two of the biggest names in the New Zealand funds management industry, are leaving the firm they founded.

Mr Botherway, 44, and Mr Glass, 42, will leave Brook Asset Management on December 19.

They are not commenting on why they are leaving or what they will do next, but the move comes after Australia's Macquarie moved to full ownership of the firm earlier this year.

Both Mr Botherway and Mr Glass have reputations as shareholder activists as well as successful fund managers.

Brook has more than $1 billion under management and is among the largest managers of Australasian equities in New Zealand. It has a mandate from the NZ Superfund to manage part of its portfolio.

The pair are likely to be subject to a restraint of trade preventing them from setting up in competition for a period of time.

"I have been here for 12 years and I personally have a very high degree of confidence in the team and think they will continue to do a very good job for clients," Mr Botherway told NZPA.

Their departure comes at a time when there is a generational change going on in the senior ranks of the local fund management industry with the departure of Wayne Stechman from Tower and before that the departure of Nat Vallabh from AMP.

Many of that generation entered the job market at the time the New Zealand economy was being de-regulated from the mid-1980s onward and had senior jobs at a young age.

Mr Botherway started at Southpac in 1986. Southpac, the merchant banking arm of National Bank of New Zealand, was where many of the big names in the financial markets got their start under the leadership of Sir John Anderson and treasurer John Duncan. Many members of the Southpac team grew up in Christchurch as Mr Botherway did.

Mr Botherway was later recruited by Prime Minister elect John Key and was his number two on the foreign exchange desk at Bankers Trust for three to four years.

A SundayStar Times profile of Mr Botherway recalled that at the age of 35, when he was in charge of New Zealand and Australian equities for Spicers Portfolio Management, he stood and berated the chairman of Fletcher Challenge at a shareholder meeting. It was not common for fund managers to put pressure on in a public forum at the time.

Brook voted against the re-election of a number of incumbent directors and called for changes at SkyCity. It also helped push Toll Holdings to offer a higher price for Tranz Rail.

Mr Botherway said Brook is a large-cap value manager.

He believed that shareholders had been somewhat passive and needed to be heard from.

"If you think about the electorate, the judiciary and the executive in a democratic system those roles are not dissimilar to shareholders, board and executive," Mr Botherway said.

Shareholders had a duty to exercise their rights as owners. Mr Botherway led a management buyout of Spicer's Australasian equities management business in 2002 and renamed it Brook.

He received a NZ Shareholders' Association Beacon award in 2005.

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