(April 25 – 10:40 ET) – Elantis Investment Management Inc., a subsidiary of the Mouvement Desjardins, has acquired Gabbay International Inc., another investment management firm.

Gabbay specializes investing in European, Australian and Far East markets. Its assets under management total close to $80 million.

Elantis Investment Management has been in the investment management business for more than 25 years. It has nearly $11 billion in assets under management.

In joining Elantis, Gabbay gains access to the research services of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Alliance Capital Management, whose research department includes 280 analysts. “Our firm’s integration with Elantis will allow us to have daily contact with specialists from our own field as well as from the quantitative research field,” stated Richard Gabbay. “By joining forces with Elantis, we are mutually strengthening our resources so that we may continue offering our clients high-quality investment management products”.

“Creating a world-class management firm in Montreal is at the core of Elantis’s business strategy,” explained Richard Neault, president and COO at Elantis. “We’re making good progress with the business plan we unveiled in May of 2000. The teams dedicated to quantitative research and to the management of investments on North American markets are already in place, which enabled us last March to bring back to Montreal a fair portion of the assets entrusted to outside firms for the management of American equities. The Gabbay team will be a solid foundation on which we will gradually be able to build a high-calibre international management team and thus repatriate the management of EAFE investments”.