Dan Och still runs the show at Och-Ziff Capital Management Group. He’s the chief executive officer, the chairman of the board and very much the face of the hedge-fund powerhouse he founded more than two decades ago.
But in the wake of a bribery scandal that spooked clients and blew away a third of its assets, the fund’s fate is in many ways now in the hands of a little-known 34-year-old named Jimmy Levin.
Back in February, Och shocked many on Wall Street by elevating Levin, the star of the firm’s credit business, to co-chief investment officer and handing him an incentive package of $280 million. It’s the kind of crazy pay you don’t hear about in the industry much these days, and Och wagered a small personal fortune to make it happen, relinquishing 30 million of his own shares.
Inside the firm, some seethed. Outside, they sneered; the move smelled a bit of desperation. Five months later, that remains the burning question: Is this a Hail-Mary stab by Och to win back his seat of dominance in the hedge-fund universe or a stroke of genius?
“It’s a bet he’s making, just as he was making on any of his investments,” said Adam Kahn, a managing partner at the executive-search firm Odyssey Search Partners. “Dan probably likes the risk-reward in the package he’s giving to Jimmy,” who has become “for all intents and purposes the succession plan” at Och-Ziff. Dan Och declined to comment on the matter.
The challenge Levin faces is sizable: to reverse the merciless bleeding of assets -- and defections of personnel -- triggered by Och-Ziff’s misconduct in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya and other African countries. If Levin makes it happen, it’ll be because he’s successful in his push to remake Och-Ziff, a firm long dominated by equity trades, into something of a fixed-income shop. The firm now has half of its $32 billion in assets tied to credit, including dedicated funds that have cropped up in just the past few years.
“We certainly weren’t known as a credit shop when I first met with clients,” Levin said recently from an Och-Ziff conference room overlooking Central Park, recalling when he was a twenty-something on the road trying to convince investors to part with their money. “Those early meetings weren’t the easiest in the world.”
Outsize Profits
Levin, who began working at Och-Ziff in 2006, is a largely unknown quantity beyond the firm’s immediate universe. But he has a reputation there for something of a golden touch. His rise started in the aftermath of the financial crisis, as he persuaded the man who’s now his co-CIO, David Windreich, to gamble on the rubbles of structured credit assets tied to the U.S. housing market and, later, on similarly roughed up securities in Europe, including Spanish regional debt that paid off.
The firm’s main credit fund has turned in average gains of 13 percent since its 2011 inception, including an 18 percent return last year that made it one of the top performing funds in the industry. Back in 2012, credit trades guided by Levin notched $2 billion, accounting for more than half of the firm’s total gains that year. The credit unit was pulling in such outsize returns that Levin was named global head of credit in 2013.