Jacque Millard, Longtime Intermountain Healthcare CIO, Has Retired

Jacque Millard, former chief investment officer at Intermountain Healthcare

Jacque Millard, longtime vice president and chief investment officer at Intermountain Healthcare, has retired after nearly 28 years at the fund. Her last day was Jan. 15.

Millard had planned to retire last year, aiming to take some personal time after her husband died following a long battle with cancer. But she decided against it while her fund was contending with the fallout from the pandemic. Now, she is focused on figuring out her next move.

“For me, it was more of a personal decision than a career decision,” Millard said. “I had been with Intermountain Healthcare for almost 28 years. So I felt like I had done everything I needed to do and the portfolio is positioned where I wanted it to be when I left, and so I felt like it was a really good time.”

The organization, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, provides hospital and other medical services in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.

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Intermountain Vice President of Finance Greg Johnson will act as investment chief in the interim, while the fund searches for a permanent replacement. Korn Ferry is conducting a national search for the position. An internal candidate is also in the running.

Even after retiring, Millard, a 2016 CIO Innovator, is keeping a busy schedule. She serves on several investment committees, holding over from her time as CIO, including at the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust in Phoenix. She also has longstanding ties to the private equity and venture capital community in Utah.

In the couple weeks since she has retired, she has picked up two advisory board positions at private equity funds Cross Creek Capital and Cynosure Group. She is also considering board positions at private firms, including one that is working on clinical trials for cancer. She still wants to be involved in the investment world, albeit with a far more flexible schedule than the one she was used to.

“People thought that I would get bored and want to be back in a full-time CIO role quickly, and I don’t think that will be the case. I think I want to take it slowly and really try to experience the retired life part-time,” Millard said. “What I’ve told people is that they need to give me six months before I make any kind of long-term decisions.”

During her time at Intermountain, Millard saw the portfolio grow to about $15 billion, up from just $1 billion when she started in 1993. She said she is proud of her role in diversifying the fund, as well as adding risk controls to the portfolio.

Putting in risk controls was a lesson that came out of the 2008 financial crisis, when Intermountain lost double-digit returns during the market drop. The fund was never forced to sell equities during the slide, according to Millard. Since then, the fund has regularly modeled for worst case scenarios and in March, it continued to purchase equities.

In roughly three decades, she helped the fund build capacity for direct investments and move away from leaning heavily on investment consultants and funds of funds. Her team also grew to 10, up from two.

She has several key pieces of advice for her replacement. First, allocators should communicate clearly with the people around them, whether that’s their senior executives, their executive committees, or their financial investment committee.

Second, allocators should proactively build long-term relationships with money managers. Doing this ahead of time can help allocators lock in investments when opportunity arises. That’s what Millard did in her final days at Intermountain, which allocated $150 million across several portfolios to Artisan Partners.

“I think it’s important to have and maintain long-term relationships with investment managers whether they’re currently in your book or not,” Millard said.

Millard closed out her tenure at the firm advocating for the beneficiaries within Intermountain’s defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans and helping employees financially prepare for retirement.

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Tags: chief investment officers, CIO, Defined benefit (db) pension plans, Intermountain Healthcare, Investment, Jacque Millard, Korn Ferry, medicine, Pension, Retirement

The founder of a New York-based hedge fund has pleaded guilty to bankruptcy fraud for pressuring a rival investor to abandon a bid to acquire certain assets from the Neiman Marcus bankruptcy so he could buy them for as little as half as much.

When luxury department store Neiman Marcus filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, Marble Ridge Capital founder Daniel Kamensky was appointed co-chair of the official committee of unsecured creditors. According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Kamensky was negotiating with the committee to acquire Neiman Marcus securities known as MyTheresa series B shares for $0.20 a share when he learned that an unnamed investment bank wanted to offer between $0.30 and $0.40 each for the same shares.

The complaint against Kamensky alleges he contacted a senior trader and a senior analyst at the investment bank and told them not to place a bid, arguing that Marble Ridge should have the exclusive right to purchase the securities. He allegedly threatened to use his position as co-chair of the committee to prevent the investment bank from acquiring the securities, and said Marble Ridge would never again do business with the bank if it didn’t drop its bid.

After the threat from Kamensky, the investment bank decided not to bid for the securities. But when the bank informed the legal adviser to the committee about its decision, it also mentioned that was doing so at Kamensky’s request. Kamensky allegedly then contacted the senior trader again and tried to get them to change their story and say they were mistaken. Kamensky allegedly said to them, “Do you understand … I can go to jail?”

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As a member of the committee of unsecured creditors, Kamensky was required by law to represent the interests of all unsecured creditors as a group, said the complaint, and the higher bid from the investment bank was clearly more favorable for the creditors than the offer from Marble Ridge.

“Daniel Kamensky abused his position as a committee member in the Neiman Marcus bankruptcy to corrupt the process for distributing assets and take extra profits for himself and his hedge fund,” Audrey Strauss, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Marble Ridge has since resigned from the committee and has informed its investors that it intends to begin winding down operations and return investor capital.

The one count of bankruptcy fraud that Kamensky, 48, pleaded guilty to carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He will be sentenced in May.