Former CMHC head taking over as CEO of AIMCO
Evan Siddall, the former head of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., will take over as president and chief executive of Alberta Investment Management Corp. as a leadership overhaul of the province's public pension fund manager continues.
“I am delighted to join Alberta Investment Management Corporation as chief executive officer and to further strengthen the organization's commitment to its clients across all aspects of its business,” Siddall said in a release Thursday.
AIMCO manages the province's $118.6-billion public sector pension fund.
Siddall will take over on July 1 from outgoing CEO Kevin Uebelein, who has led AIMCO since 2015.
Uebelein's retirement from the pension manager was accelerated by a few months after AIMCO recorded major losses from a volatility-trading program last year.
Since those losses were disclosed, Edmonton-based AIMCO has gone through a leadership overhaul including the appointment of a new board chair in Mark Wiseman, a former Blackrock Inc. executive and former CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
AIMCO lost $2.1 billion last year on its VOLTS program, which traded market volatility. When markets crashed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, AIMCO'S volatility trades suffered huge losses and the pension manager ended the program and launched a review.
The results of that review were sent to AIMCO'S board on June 30, 2020 and showed the organization's risk management controls were “unsatisfactory.” Among its 10 recommendations on how to improve the public pension fund manager, the report said that a culture change was needed.
Siddall takes the reins at AIMCO as the organization continues to implement those recommendations.
“Evan is an executive who is ready to drive the organization forward with an exceptional focus on clients, commitment to collaboration and deep knowledge of financial services,” Wiseman said in a release.
AIMCO reported Thursday that it earned a total return of 2.5 per cent last year, but that return is 5.4 per cent below its benchmark for 2020.
The release did not describe how much of that underperformance could be attributed to VOLTS, but noted detailed information on the performance would be published in an annual report in June.
Siddall comes to AIMCO after leading CMHC for seven years, during a time of massive appreciation in Canadian housing values in cities including Vancouver and Toronto.
His prediction, at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, that the pandemic would reverse the growth, resulting in a nine-per-cent to 18-per-cent plunge in home values, proved wrong.
Instead, the market recorded a record year for sales and prices. Siddall explained the error in March, saying he was sharing the predictions of colleagues.
Born in Toronto in 1965, Siddall has a law degree from the Osgoode Hall Law School, York University and a BA in Management Economics from the University of Guelph in 1987. Before joining the CMHC, he worked as a special adviser to the governor of the Bank of Canada and as an investment banker, with Goldman Sachs & Co. and BMO Nesbitt Burns, among others.
AIMCO is under increasing scrutiny as the provincial government has been discussing withdrawing Alberta's contributions to the Canada Pension Plan and handing the management of those investments over to AIMCO.
In addition, the Alberta Teachers Retirement Fund board has been working to transfer the management of its assets to AIMCO, despite the objections of some teachers unions.