Hot on the heels of its move to hire a senior Goldman Sachs executive, New York-listed hedge fund firm GLG Partners said it has poached two senior managers from US investment bank Morgan Stanley.

GLG said it has appointed Karim Abdel-Motaal and Bart Turtelboom as co-heads of a number of GLG funds. They will be based in London.

They will lead management of the Emerging Markets Fund, the Emerging Currency and Fixed Income Fund and the Emerging Equity Fund. Mr Abdel-Motaal and Mr Turtelboom will join GLG in October 2008 from Morgan Stanley where they were global co-heads of emerging markets sales and trading.

“During their tenure at Morgan Stanley, Karim and Bart managed one of the most successful emerging markets businesses in the industry which included substantial proprietary capital that was invested across the full range of emerging markets securities and regions,” GLG said in a statement.

Prior to Morgan Stanley, Mr Abdel-Motaal worked as a trader at Tudor Capital, where he managed one of that firm’s emerging markets trading books and at JP Morgan, where he was the global head of emerging local markets research for five years.

Mr Turtelboom joined Morgan Stanley in 2004 from Vega Asset Management, where he was an emerging markets portfolio manager. Prior to this, he was a director at Deutsche Bank in London, where he was responsible for covering Deutsche Bank’s large clients in emerging markets.

On Monday, GLG said it had appointed Driss Ben-Brahim, who oversees Goldman’s emerging-markets trading. He has been targeted by GLG to help expand its special-situations business.

The job will include running the roughly $1.2 billion emerging-markets special-situations fund that is now run by Greg Coffey, the GLG fund manager who is leaving the firm in October.