Kris Douma leaves Dutch pension fund manager MN

Kris Douma, Director Responsible Investment & Governance at MN, the €92bn Dutch pension fund manager, is to officially leave the company later this year, Responsible Investor has learnt. Douma, who had been with the company for seven and a half years, will no longer be at MN from December 1, according to a spokesman at the manager. The spokesman said: “MN has been in discussions with Kris Douma with regards to him leaving to seek new challenges in his area of responsible investment expertise, and an agreement has been reached.”
Douma led a team of five other RI staff at MN including Narina Mnatsakanian, Senior Advisor Responsible Investment & Governance. Douma is understood to already be on gardening leave and looking at future opportunities within responsible investment.
Douma’s role as Director Responsible Investment & Governance will be taken over on an interim basis by MN’s interim CIO, Gerald Cartigny, who Douma reported to.
Cartigny took up the interim role of CIO & Director Fiduciary Management at MN in April this year, stepping in for Wouter Pelser, long-term CIO at MN, who has been out through illness.
The MN spokesman said Cartigny would assume the lead RI role until Douma’s replacement was hired,although he said he did not know over what timeframe the new hire might be made.
MN is one of the largest pension administrators and asset managers in the Netherlands and the UK. It runs the pension assets of Dutch metal schemes PMT and PME, the pension fund for the merchant navy (Koopvaardij), and a number of other Dutch and UK schemes.
Douma is a former Dutch politician who stood for four years as a member of parliament for the Dutch Social Democratic Party (PvdA). In that time, he worked on major Dutch and European social and economic reform such as the Tabaksblat code of corporate governance and the European Transparency Directive. Before that, he spent 15 years at FNV Bondgenoten, the largest Dutch trade union.
He is a highly regarded figure in responsible investment. At MN he was responsible for the execution of shareholder rights in its €20bn+ equity portfolio and sat as Chair of the investment committee of Eumedion, the Dutch investor corporate governance platform.
Douma was also a prime mover in pushing responsible investment in private equity and is a member of the Policy and Research Steering Committee of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI).