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About Us

About Us

About Us

We are Active Managers of Global Alternative Credit Portfolios 

We have been managing research-driven credit strategies for over 20 years, across multiple market cycles. Today we are a company of Manulife Investment Management offering investors a multi-sector alternative credit platform, focused on what our teams know best: global credit. Our teams are committed to building enduring partnerships with investors, seeking to generate long-term risk-adjusted returns and delivering high levels of service, tailoring mandates across a range of return objectives and risk appetites. To achieve this, our culture is rooted in teamwork and an open, inclusive, and collegial working environment.

Manulife |CQS Investment Management has a history and ethos of active credit management. Since our inception in 1999, we have focused on a thorough bottom-up fundamental research process, ensuring we have a clear view on the probability of default, and extent of recovery, of all investments and ensuring credit spreads compensate investors for any potential loss risk. This disciplined research-driven process has been built on our heritage and experience of running alternatives credit mandates. The breadth of our alternative credit platform enables asset class teams to work together to understand relative value. We use our position as an established global provider of credit to actively seek improvements from the companies in which we invest. We engage with these issuers to foster long-term meaningful change and share our expertise to help make their business models and cash flows more sustainable. Our investment view has always been that being active and selective (i.e., lending to the right businesses and not buying the market) should enable us to achieve strong risk-adjusted returns through income, potential capital gains, and managing fundamental potential loss risks.

About Manulife Investment Management 

Manulife Investment Management is the brand of the global wealth and asset management segment of Manulife Financial Corporation. Serving more than 17 million individuals, institutions, and retirement plan members, we believe our global reach, complementary businesses, and the strength of our parent company position us to help investors capitalize on today’s emerging global trends. We provide our clients access to public and private investment solutions across equities, fixed income, multi-asset, alternative, and sustainability-linked strategies.

20+ years of delivering fundamental research-driven investment across liquid and semi-liquid credit markets from our offices in London and New York.

We offer investors a multi-sector alternative credit platform focused on what our teams know best: global credit.

Inclusion and Diversity

For us, diversity of our workforce is an output of our progressive and inclusive culture. Team members continually interact across all levels of seniority and experience, and we encourage this. We empower our people without losing the sense of accountability of our leadership.

Our structure gives us the ability to be nimble and promote inclusivity, enabling our staff to speak up and share their views throughout the organisation. Our strength comes from being able to attract, develop and retain individuals from a broad range of backgrounds.

We pride ourselves on our ability to nurture individuals from the grassroots up, and we are engaged in a number of initiatives to further help us to establish a diverse pipeline of future talent. This includes encouraging promotion across departments, identifying individuals to undergo training and move into the Front Office, and our focus on our graduate programme. We are continuing to widen the mix of people who join the Firm, and grow our existing talent pool.

Initiatives and Corporate Social Responsibility

We deeply believe in our social responsibilities, both to our staff and to our communities.

Our Corporate Social Responsibility is focused on working with organisations who share our goals and values. We are passionate about supporting youth development, and promoting opportunities to make the broader industry more accessible to diverse talent.

Management Committee

Soraya Chabarek

Chief Executive Officer

Soraya Chabarek

Soraya Chabarek

Chief Executive Officer

Soraya Chabarek is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CQS. She is a Senior Partner, Director on the CQS Board of Directors and a member of the Asset Advisory Committee for Multi Asset Credit. Since joining CQS over 11 years ago, Soraya has been instrumental in the transformation of CQS from a hedge fund into a multi-sector alternative credit platform. She has led the growth of the Firm’s core credit strategies to reach a broader client base of institutional investors and private wealth channels globally. Soraya is directly involved in shaping the investment platform to provide the best offering to clients. With her extensive experience, she oversees key relationships with the Firm's clients around the world and under her leadership, CQS has won prestigious investment mandates, including with major global public and private pension schemes. 

As CEO, Soraya has focused on cultivating the next generation of talent, especially in her role leading the front office investment teams. She has also championed wellbeing, diversity and inclusion at CQS, including founding the CQS Women’s Network, and has built multi-year partnerships with charities and organisations that promote youth development.

During her 25-year career, Soraya has had exposure to a broad range of strategies, including credit, convertibles, global macro, equities, and emerging markets. She is well-known and respected for her ability to provide client-oriented solutions and shape strategies to meet client needs. Soraya began her career at HSBC Private Bank and in 2000, moved to Permal Investment Management in London where she focused on distributing fund of hedge funds across EMEA. As a fluent Arabic speaker, Soraya joined GLG Partners in 2004 as a Principal (and Partner) to build out their Middle Eastern presence. The region became a significant contributor to AUM growth. In 2008, when Greg Coffey joined Moore Europe Capital Management, Soraya joined with him as Head of Marketing for Emerging Macro Strategies and a Partner. Here, she successfully rebuilt the asset base during a difficult period in asset management. 

Soraya holds a BA in Economics and Public Administration from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Craig Scordellis

CIO Credit

Craig Scordellis

Craig Scordellis

CIO Credit

Craig is CIO Credit, responsible for CQS’ Multi Asset Credit business. He is a Senior Partner and chairs the Multi Asset Credit Asset Advisory Committee.

Craig previously headed global loans and was responsible for managing the Firm’s loan mandates, including those in a variety of multi asset credit funds and collateralised loan obligations. Prior to joining CQS in 2008, Craig was a Senior Investment Analyst and Assistant Portfolio Manager at New Amsterdam Capital Management, a credit hedge fund. Before this, he was an Associate at the Royal Bank of Scotland where he structured leverage finance and high yield bond transactions. Prior to RBS, Craig was on the Deutsche Bank Investment Banking graduate program.

Craig holds a BSc (First Class Hons) in Business Administration from the University of Bath.

Jason Walker

CIO ABS

Jason Walker

Jason Walker

CIO ABS

Jason is Chief Investment Officer of ABS and manages CQS’ global asset-backed securities strategies across dedicated alternative and long only funds, together with bespoke and longer-lock mandates. He leads the dedicated ABS team of portfolio managers and analysts who are located in London and New York. Jason is a Senior Partner and is a member of the Asset Advisory Committee for Multi Asset Credit.

Prior to joining CQS in 2010, Jason held a number of ABS Portfolio Management positions. Before CQS he was with Henderson Global Investors where he was a member of the team managing the Henderson European ABS Opportunities Fund. Before this, he held ABS Portfolio Management roles at Bank of Scotland Treasury, TD Securities and Abbey National Treasury Services, where he began his career as a graduate trainee in 1995.

Jason holds an M.Sc. in Finance from the University of Strathclyde and a BA (Hons) Accountancy from Glasgow Caledonian University.