Serena Williams was baptised as a Jehovah's Witness last year. Photo: PA
John Mulligan
The Jehovah’s Witnesses religious group has established a new asset management firm in Ireland that features a slate of heavy-hitting directors, including the former chief risk officer at Swiss banking giant UBS and other seasoned investment bankers.
The experienced financial directors are all understood to also have ties to the religious movement.
The religious group is thought to have tens of billions of dollars in assets and relies on anonymous donations from its members to support all of its activities.
It has established three companies in Ireland in recent weeks, including Mina Asset Management, Mina Treasury Services and Lepta Payment Solutions. All three are based at the community’s Irish headquarters in Co Wicklow.
The directors of Mina Asset Management include three US-based directors and others based in Germany and Australia.
One of the directors is Philip Lofts.
He worked for UBS in the United States for three decades and was the group chief risk officer from 2009 to 2010, and from 2012 to 2015. He also served as CEO of UBS Americas in 2011.
He was a non-executive director of UBS Group Americas from 2017 until 2023. He is currently a non-executive board member of major Swiss private banking group EFG International.
Vassilios Pappas, with an address in Germany, is also a director of Mina Asset Management.
He is the co-founder and managing director of leading global asset management firm Assenagon Asset Management. It has about €57bn of assets under management.
Tobias Broweleit is currently an adjunct professor at Germany’s for-profit IU International University of Applied Sciences and lists his address in New York at the Jehovah’s Witnesses property.
He worked for German banking giant Sparkasse as a portfolio manager from 2007 to 2009 and also held other roles at the group.
Nolan Vengethasamy is also a director. He worked as a bond trader with ABN Amro from 1997 to 2001. He also worked for South Africa’s Standard Bank Group.
Another director of Mina Asset Management is New Zealander Stuart Bull, who gives his address as the headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses office in the UK was asked for comment.
There are about 8.8 million Jehovah’s Witnesses in the world, and an estimated 8,000 across the island of Ireland. About 1.2 million are in the United States.
It has amassed considerable assets since the movement was founded in Pittsburgh in 1872 by Charles Taze Russell.
In 2015, it put its worldwide headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, up for sale in various lots.
It was expected to fetch as much as $1bn as the group planned a move to upstate New York. In 2018, the group sold the last of the properties it owned in Brooklyn, bringing to 37 the total number of properties it sold in the borough since 2004.
In 2018, just one of the apartment blocks it sold in Brooklyn fetched $202m when it was sold to Florida-based private equity firm Kayne Anderson Real Estate.
Among the well-known Jehovah’s Witnesses are tennis champion Serena Williams, who was baptised by the group in Florida last year.