Campaigning pension fund manager who smoked out wrongdoing at big companies in which his clients invested.
Pension fund managers rarely find their way barred by bouncers, but the tall, slim, donnish Ralph Quartano was unfazed. “I think I am entitled to an explanation,” he told them. “I would like a word with the chairman.” The heavies stood their ground. It was 1982 and Quartano was trying, as a major investor responsible for the pensions of 400,000 Post Office employees, to enter the shareholders’ meeting of Lew Grade’s Associated Communications Corporation (ACC). Now defunct, it was the Midlands television franchise company known for The Muppet Show, Thunderbirds and General Hospital.
The foyer of its Marble Arch office in London was thronged with reporters and shareholders. Grade, a former tap dancer, was keeping them at bay with a legal shuffle to confine the meeting to the few owners of ACC’s voting shares. Quartano and the other outcasts owned only non-voting shares. A secretary poked her head out of the door. “The instructions have been misunderstood,” she said. “It was only the press that were not to be admitted.” Quartano objected to a then-record £560,000 golden handshake to Jack Gill, the group’s former managing director, and selling him a house at £100,000 below valuation, while omitting the shareholders’ dividend. He successfully petitioned the High Court to scrap the plan. The campaign earned him a fearsome reputation in boardrooms and transformed the status of fund managers. A few months later Quartano stood up at the M&S annual meeting and berated the board for keeping quiet about letting executive directors live at low rents in houses they chose, with options to buy them cheaply. Managements soon realised that they were never going to beat Quartano in public, so they gradually steered him and other fund managers into discreet private gatherings, even directorships, to discuss sensitive issues. “Previously,” he said, “the corporate world had regarded pension funds as brontosauri, of very low intelligence but essentially harmless. All that changed with our actions.”
Ralph Nicholas Quartano was born in London in 1927, the only child of Charles and Vivien Quartanos. Charles, who dropped the “s” from his name when he reached England, was a Greek civil engineer from Corfu. Vivien was a Scots-Australian golfer.
They sent Ralph to Sherborne School in Dorset (Lyon House). He took up fencing at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences and chemical engineering, taking a term off to study medieval history at the Sorbonne. He was fluent in French, Greek and Dutch. He chose Shell when he graduated because it paid best, and they sent him to the Hague as a process engineer. On the fencing strip there he met Cornelia Johanna de Gunst, a Dutch foil champion. They married in 1954. She died in 1996. He is survived by their daughters: Katie, who works for the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and Henrietta, who is assistant director of Greenwich social services, specialising in child protection.
In 2000 he met Kathryn Brown, who was fundraising for a community production she was directing in Birmingham of Jonathan Dove’s Tobias and the Angel. Brown had been turned down by several corporate sponsors, but when Quartano hit the phones, cheque books opened. They married six years later.
He joined the Sloan Fellowship programme at London Business School in 1970. It opened his eyes to finance and accountancy and led him into the Post Office finance department. He became chief executive of the Post Office superannuation fund in 1974. One of his first jobs was to persuade the flamboyant entrepreneur Sir James Goldsmith to unwind an unfair deal he had struck with the fund over Les Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris.
After British Telecom split off in 1984, Quartano persuaded it to let him continue managing both pension funds as PosTel Investment Management. It is now Hermes Fund Managers, owned by Federated Hermes, based in Pittsburgh. After retiring as PosTel’s chairman in 1991, Quartano became a director of Britoil, Enterprise Oil, Laird Group, Booker and Bupa, and helped to set up the Securities and Investment Board. “My father would have been pleased but puzzled by my success,” said Quartano. “Pleased because I had been recognised outside engineering. Puzzled because I had done so without sock suspenders, which he told me would ruin my chances of a career.”
Ralph Quartano, fund manager, was born on August 3, 1927. He died of an aneurysm on January 1, 2021, aged 93.
Reproduced courtesy of The Times.