Martin Scott, formerly the head of investment sales at Zurich, has been recruited by a Swiss alternatives manager as co-head of its newly-established Sydney office.

Scott will be joined at the Sydney base of Partners Group by Mike Siebert, who has worked in the manager’s Singapore office since 2004. Both will be responsible for business development, investment origination and client relationships in the region. Phillip Gysler, head of Asia at Partners Group, said superannuation funds represented a “rapidly-developing client segment”. Partners Group is a 24.4 billion franc manager running private equity, private debt (such as mezzanine financing), private real estate, hedge fund and alternative beta strategies. In Australia, it provides JANA Investment Advisers with alternative beta vehicles for its Triple-point hedge fund-of-funds, which draws on active hedge fund managers, alternative beta strategies and passive equity managers. It also recently co-invested with domestic private equity manager Ironbridge Capital in furniture retailer Super A-Mart. The majority of its recent growth has come from private equity investments, which accounted for 16.7 billion francs of its invested capital in 2007.