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One of Canada’s biggest pension funds has parted ways with two top infrastructure executives after writing off its stake in Thames Water and the souring of another high-profile European investment.
Alastair Hall, senior managing director for Europe, and Chris Hogg, a director who led the firm’s digital infrastructure investments, have left Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System in recent weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The exits follow struggles at two of Omers’ top investments. Hall, who joined in 2014, was involved in the fund’s investment in Thames Water. The fund was the utility’s largest shareholder and wrote off its entire 31 per cent stake in 2024.
Hogg, who joined in 2023, was one of the lead executives on Deutsche Glasfaser, a heavily indebted German broadband provider now scrambling to secure its financial future. Omers jointly bought Glasfaser with EQT in 2020 and holds a 49 per cent stake.
In December, the pension fund proposed a €1.7bn refinancing deal to Glasfaser’s creditors alongside EQT under which the owners would inject €1.1bn of “preferred” equity in exchange for €600mn of “super senior” debt.
Holders of the “super senior” debt would be the first to be repaid in the event of a bankruptcy, while “preferred” equity investors would get priority over the previous equity put into the business.
The shareholders have already invested €4bn into Glasfaser since purchasing it from KKR in 2020. Last year, they were forced to scale back the company’s original goal of serving 6mn homes by 2032 to just 3.2mn, in an effort to cut costs and stabilise the business.
A person familiar with the matter said Hogg was not the most senior Omers executive responsible for Glasfaser.
Omers manages C$141bn (about $104bn) of assets on behalf of 640,000 current or former public-sector and community workers in Canada’s Ontario province.
Some 22 per cent of the fund was invested in infrastructure at the end of June, with 19 per cent in private equity and 13 per cent in private credit. European investments account for 18 per cent of the total portfolio.
The fund is exploring the sale of its 33 per cent stake in Associated British Ports in a deal it hopes will complete in the second half of this year and value the UK’s biggest ports operator at more than £10bn.
It also sold its stake in London City Airport to Macquarie last year alongside Alberta Investment Management Corporation, following Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan’s sale of its holding in the airport to Australia’s largest infrastructure investor last June.
A person familiar with Omers said the sales and the departure of executives did not indicate that Omers was looking to scale back its European infrastructure investments. They cited the fund’s acquisition of a network of Italian railway stations, Grandi Stazioni Retail, alongside DWS in 2024.
The same year, Omers restructured its European private equity team as it announced it would no longer invest directly in private companies in the region.
Michael Hill, global head of Omers Infrastructure, said Europe remained an integral part of its diversification strategy. He thanked Hall for his “significant contributions” and said recruitment for a new European infrastructure head was under way.
Additional reporting by Gill Plimmer in London