Long-time activist investor Guy Wyser-Pratt and Knight Vinke Asset Management co-founder Patrick Dewez are planning a $1 billion hedge fund to target underperforming European companies.

The move by Wyser-Pratt, who manages some US$500 million from New York, is taking aim at some markets that are distinctly unfriendly towards shareholder activism.

“There’s a socio-political agenda,” he told the Financial Times. “I see that the two remaining communist countries in Europe are not in the east, they are Germany and France.”

The new fund will be managed from a new European office by both Wyser-Pratt and Dewez, who last year quit as CEO of Knight Vinke.