Santosh Kamath’s appetite for high-yield Indian debt helped create the nation’s market for lower-rated corporate bonds and turned him into one of the country’s best-known investors.
Now the Franklin Templeton manager’s embrace of risk is backfiring in spectacular fashion.
In a surprise move that rippled through Indian markets on Friday, Franklin Templeton said it would wind up six fixed-income and credit-risk funds overseen by Kamath, freezing $4.1 billion of investor assets. Closing the funds is the “only viable option to preserve value for investors and to enable an orderly and equitable exit,” the asset manager said in a statement.
