London-based Met Capital Management plans to launch the Met Pacific Fund, an Asia Pacific equity long/short strategy. Met’s co-founder Jonathan Gordon will be the portfolio manager for the new fund.

Hong Kong-based Athos Capital, founded by Matthew Moskey, Erik Senko (both ex-Tiresias Capital) and Fred Schulte-Hillen (ex-Black’s Link Capital) plans to launch an Asia-Pacific event-driven hedge fund in April. The fund will be seeded by Ascalon Capital Managers.

Yiming Liang (ex-Standard Chartered) and Yang Yang (ex-Huatai Asset Management) plan to launch a China-focused hedge fund called Goldstream in the coming weeks.

Joseph Pacini has joined BlackRock as head of the alternative investors strategy group in Asia. Pacini was previously Head of Alternative Investments Asia at JP Morgan’s private bank in Hong Kong.

Sandra Lee, who recently left Paulson & Co, has joined Carlyle as a managing director in its Hong Kong office.

Ayaz Motiwala (ex-Highbridge) has joined Samena Capital’s special situations team.

Kyu Ho (ex-Kingdon) has set up Wuzhu Asia Partners in Hong Kong to run a Samena-seeded pan-Asia equity long/short strategy. Wuzhu has also recruited Grant Suttie (ex-Martin Currie) as COO and Kevin Ji (ex-Kingdon, Maverick, Goldman Sachs) as an analyst.

Doric Capital in Hong Kong, founded by Michael Nock (ex-Man), has closed down its Asian equity long/short fund to focus on a small-cap strategy instead.

Asian hedge funds raised US$4.43 billion in 2011, according to AsiaHedge. The average size of the 58 new Asian hedge funds set up during 2011 was US$76.4 million.

Asian hedge funds managed assets of US$124bn at the end of December according to Eurekahedge. Total AUM in the year 2000 was around US$20bn and assets peaked in 2007 at US$176bn.