Four veteran Western Asset Management Co. emerging-market debt investors exited for Jackson Financial Inc.’s PPM America, as fallout continues for the bond giant after its star trader was charged with criminal fraud.

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Team co-heads and portfolio managers Mark Hughes and Kevin Ritter, both senior managing directors, are joined by Matthew Graves, a managing director and portfolio manager analyst, and Kevin Zhang, a vice president and analyst, PPM said in a statement Monday.

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The move is Wamco’s biggest single public round of exits after it disclosed that Ken Leech, its then-co-chief investment officer, was under investigation for allegedly cherry-picking winning trades for favored clients and put him on leave in August. Investors yanked about $68 billion from Wamco in the final quarter of 2024.

The departing team has worked together for almost a decade and will also include current PPM managing director Marty Boulanger.

“Emerging-market debt is a compelling extension” of PPM’s fixed-income business, Jeff Seaver, PPM’s head of global distribution, said in the statement. 

Chicago-based PPM managed about $77 billion as of Sept. 30 and is an indirect subsidiary of Jackson Financial, the Lansing, Michigan-based insurer and seller of annuities.

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A spokesperson for Wamco, which is owned by Franklin Resources Inc., confirmed the departures and said the firm had added several portfolio managers to the emerging-markets portfolio team.

“There will be no changes to the funds’ investment objectives or strategies,” Wamco spokesperson Jeaneen Terrio said in the statement.

Wamco, which managed about $272 billion as of Dec. 31, has been under siege since late August, when it revealed that the US Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating Leech. The US Department of Justice charged him with criminal fraud in November, and he pleaded not guilty the following month.

Major public and institutional clients have yanked billions of dollars from Wamco, while retail and other investors have continued to pull money from its flagship core and core plus mutual funds.