Funds still seen as political creatures

The official line why Charles "Chip" Goodyear will not become chief executive of Temasek Holdings as planned is that the American executive and the board of the giant Singapore investment fund did not quite see eye-to-eye on strategy. If that's the case, it's hard to understand why it took them five months to discover the yawning gulf between them.

Whatever the reason, a rare opportunity to shed some of the image problems that have plagued Temasek and other sovereign wealth funds has now been lost.

When the financial crisis erupted in 2007, sovereign wealth funds, in particular those in the Persian Gulf and Asia, were viewed with a mixture of envy, condescension and fear - envy, of course, because of the mammoth hoards of cash they held, and yet condescension as many in the West saw the funds as naive investors throwing money into weak US and UK banks. The fear was that the SWFs had ulterior motives in extending the influence of their governments.