Henri-Paul Rousseau, the president and chief executive officer of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is stepping down to take a job in the private sector.
He will join both Power Corporation of Canada and Power Financial in January. At the next annual meetings in May 2009, Rousseau will be nominated for election to the boards of both companies as vice-chairman.
“The board is very sorry to see Mr. Rousseau go,” says Pierre Brunet, chairman of the Caisse’s board of directors. “He has made his mark as a great leader of this institution.”
Under Rousseau’s leadership, depositors’ net assets doubled to $155.4 billion from $77.7 billion between 2002 and 2007. He also played a leading role to help save the third-party asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market from collapsing last summer. The pension fund announced in April that it took a provision of $1.9 billion for its $12.6 billion investment in ABCP.
Rousseau will remain as an advisor to the Caisse’s board and officers for a three-month period ending Aug. 31, 2008.
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Chief investment officer Richard Guay will assume his responsibilities on an interim basis until a new president and CEO is appointed.
Before joining the Caisse in September 2002, Rousseau was the president and chief executive of Laurentian Bank of Canada. He was also the president and CEO of Boreal Insurance and worked for eight years in a variety of positions at National Bank Financial. Rousseau began his career as a professor of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 1975 he joined the faculty of Université Laval and later became head of its economics department.
To read Caisse Study, an interview with Henri-Paul Rousseau from the June 2005 issue of Benefits Canada, click here.
To comment on this story, email craig.sebastiano@rci.rogers.com.