HOHN
Christopher

• 1. Career

Sir Christopher Anthony Hohn is a British billionaire hedge fund manager.

In 2003, Hohn established The Children's Investment Fund Management (TCI), a prominent value-based hedge fund. Profits generated by the fund were initially proportionately allocated to The Children's Investment Fund Foundation, a registered charity in England and Wales that focuses on improving the lives of children living in poverty in developing countries. He is known as an activist investor.

As of 2014, he had given over $4.5 billion to The Children's Investment Fund Foundation. Hohn is worth $5 billion according to the Forbes billionaires list in 2020, an increase of $1.9 billion from 2019. In 2019, Forbes put Hohn in the list of the world's most generous philanthropists outside of the US. In recent years, Hohn has become an outspoken advocate of urgent action on the climate crisis, and a prolific contributor to the cause.

Career

After graduating, Hohn worked for the private equity group Apax Partners. In 1996 he went to work for Perry Capital, a hedge fund on Wall Street. In 1998 he was made head of Perry's London operations. In his time with Perry, he earned an estimated £75m.

In 2003, Hohn set up his own hedge fund, The Children's Investment Fund. TCI donated regularly to a connected charitable fund, The Children's Investment Fund Foundation, run by his wife. The original formula involved transfers of 0.5 percent of the fund's assets each year, with a further 0.5 per cent of assets for every year during which the fund achieved returns of more than 11 per cent. It is reported that Hohn established the formulaic charitable link in order to motivate himself.[8] Coinciding with the couple's divorce proceedings, changes set in motion in 2012 led to the splitting up of the fund and the foundation. The fund no longer donates money to the foundation on a contractual basis, though it may do so on a discretionary basis.

Hohn took £200m in dividend payments in 2018, slightly more than his Children's Investment (TCI) fund made in profit. This was down from $274m in 2017 and $364m in 2016. His 2015 earnings of $250 million ranked him 12th among the 25 top earning hedge fund managers.

In 2019, it was reported that he had built a €730m stake in Heathrow Airport via a range of investment companies jointly taking a 4% stake in Spanish multinational Ferrovial.

From March 2019 to March 2020 he paid himself $479 million, the highest annual amount paid to a person in the UK.

In conjunction with The Children's Investment (TCI) fund Hohn launched the "Say on climate" initiative. The idea of the campaign is to make companies disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and their plans to manage these emissions and also give shareholders an advisory vote on the plans and their results. The initiative was first implemented by Aena, Unilever, Glencore, and CN but it has won many critics at the same time.