LONDON (Reuters) -British insurer and asset manager M&G has only 0.1% of its assets under management exposed to Russia, and will divest of those assets when it can, CEO John Foley said on Tuesday.
The firm’s Russian assets have been marked almost to zero, and Foley said the asset manager had no plans to buy more.
“Russia is an uninvestable market from a ratings perspective, any additional investment is clearly unthinkable,” he said.
M&G joins a raft of asset managers who have said they will not buy more Russian securities and plan to sell what they have.
But efforts by investors to cut positions have been complicated by a Russian ban on local brokers from selling securities held by foreigners.
More than $3 billion in unlisted funds exposed to Russia were suspended last week, while several exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have also been frozen.
Foley said M&G did not have funds at risk of suspension.
“There isn’t a fund where there is any significant enough exposure into these markets that would warrant our attention,” he said.
“We are monitoring the situation all the time but there’s nothing that we need to do.”
M&G’s shares soared 11% at the open after the insurer reported above-forecast profit and assets under management for 2021, and said it would give 500 million pounds back to shareholders via a share repurchase programme.
(Reporting by Carolyn Cohn, editing by Sinead Cruise)
