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International location | 11
In Dublin’s
Fair City
Dublin, cloudy with occasional
bright spells
by Dermot Butler,
CEO, Custom House
Global Fund Services
I
t seems hardly credible (to me at least)
that the IFSC (International Financial
Services Centre) in Dublin is over 20
years old and, as I write this, it is exactly
20 years since the incorporation of the
original company of what is now the
Custom House Group of Companies, which,
today, is a member of the Equity Trust Group of
Companies.
Custom House was established to set up and
market a range of esoteric funds, each managed
by a specific manager, with specific skills, in a
specific sector. It was a model that worked well
with the McDonnell “McD” range of funds that I
had helped establish in Bermuda in the early
1980s. I am told that McDonnell and Co. was the
first fund management company to totally out-
source the investment management of its funds.
It was a unique approach at that time, until
Gilbert de Botton set up the GAM funds. I would
love to say that he followed our lead, but it was
just a total coincidence.
I left McDonnell in 1998, following the 1987
crash, out of which McDonnell came smelling of
roses, with an average of 20.5% gain across all
© Abdone
www.investmentinternational.com April 2009 Investment International
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