The new £4.6m super woman of the City

A FORMER nuclear physicist has been entrusted to run almost £250bn of savings and investments, becoming one of the most powerful women in the City.

Anne Richards ( pictured) has been appointed as the £4.6m-a-year boss of M&G, the investment arm of insurance giant Prudential.

She will replace Mike McLintock, who has taken early retirement at 54 after running M&G for almost two decades.

M&G – which looks after has £247bn of funds under management and 1,900 staff – has poached Richards from its troubled rival Aberdeen Asset Management.

Richards’s appointment, which will take effect later this year, makes the 51-year-old mother-of-two arguably the most influential women in the UK’s giant fund management industry.

She began her career in Geneva as one of the youngest ever research assistants at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. There, in a tunnel 300 feet under the border between Switzerland and France, the ambitious 22-year- old electronics and engineering graduate worked on the Large ElectronPositron Collider, the predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider.

Deciding particle physics was not for her she took a business degree in France and fell into fund management, eventually becoming chief investment officer of Aberdeen Asset Management in 2003 via stints at JP Morgan, Mercury Asset Management and Edinburgh Fund Managers.

Her defection caps a miserable spell for the emerging markets specialist which has haemorrhaged money as the slowdown in China has spooked investors.

Richards was an important figure at Aberdeen as it was buoyedyed by fast-growing emerging markets. ets.

But nervous savers withdrewhdrew £34bn from Aberdeen’s funds s in the year to the end of September,er, and another £9.4bn in the finall three months of last year.

Furious investors protested d at the lavish bonuses paid to executives,utives, with 34pc rejecting its remuneration eration report at the annual generall meeting last week.

Aberdeen, which is trying to o slash £50m from its budget, said d there would not be a direct replacementcement for Richards – who was paidd £1.9m last year. Instead her responsibilinsibilities will be shared by senior staff, including Hugh Young, who heads up the firm’s equities, fixed income and property businesses.

Aberdeen’s founder Martin Gilbert said: ‘ While we are sorry to lose Anne we are delighted that one of our colleagues should have been appointed to such an important role in the industry.’

Her appointment received the thumbs up from Mark Dampier, head of research at pensions and i nvestments giant Hargreaves Lansdown. He said: ‘This seems like a cracking appointment for M&G and will be a big loss for Aberdeen. She is an investment person. McLintock was not, although he has done a good job’. Richards also joins at a testing time for M&G, which suffered from £11bn of outflows in the year to the end of November.

M&G has developed a reputation for lavishing its executives and fund managers with huge pay packages.

It paid £17.5m to fund manager Richard Woolnough last year despite generating disappointing returns for his investors. McLintock received a £5.6m package.

Richards will also benefit from this largesse. She will receive a basic salary of £400,000 but will be able to earn up to six times this amount – or £2.4m – as an annual bonus if she hits performance targets. There is also a long term shares award of up to £1.8m on offer.

This adds up to a maximum package of £4.6m, plus other perks such as pensions and insurance which were not disclosed yesterday.

Despite her considerable wealth, Richards appears to have relatively modest tastes. She drives a Kia Picanto hatchback, and likes to tend to her vegetable allotment in her spare time.

Shares in Prudential fell 41p to 1326.5p on the announcement, while Aberdeen fell 1.5p to 245p.