Shareholders of Davis Funds voted Nov. 29 to confirm a board consolidation effort that added three independent directors to the Davis board as of Jan. 1.
All three join the Davis Funds board as part of a shareholder-approved consolidation that placed Clipper Funds and Selected Funds, both of which are also managed by Davis Selected Advisers, under the oversight of the main Davis Funds board.
Katherine MacWilliams, Francisco Borges and Richard O’Brien, will fill slots on the Davis board left empty by the Dec. 31 departure of longtime board members Marsha Williams and Robert Morgenthau.
Williams retired at the end of 2024 after 25 years as a trustee on Davis boards. Morgenthau resigned his seat effective Dec. 31 as part of the consolidation plan and received a severance payment of $125,000 as partial compensation, according to an Oct. 4 Davis filing. Selected Funds and Clipper Fund trustee Lawrence Harris received severance of $89,250 after agreeing to resign his seat as well.
All three new Davis Fund trustees come from the other fund groups, where they’ve held seats for more than a decade. The changes will boost the total number of Davis Fund trustees temporarily to nine, seven of whom are independent. O’Brien’s planned retirement will drop the number of independents to six at the end of 2025.
The Davis Funds board also recently approved a policy requiring that trustees retire on the last day of the calendar year during which the member turns 78.
MacWilliams, 68, is the former CFO of Caridian BCT, Inc., where she worked from 2008 until her retirement in 2012. Before that she served as the CFO of Molson Coors Brewing Company beginning in 1999.
Borges, 72, has been chairman and head of secondaries at Ares Management Corporation since 2021, which he joined after leaving Landmark Partners, from which he resigned as chairman and managing partner from 1999 to 2021.
He currently holds seats as a chairman and trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, chairman and director of Assured Guaranty, trustee of Millbrook School and director of Hartford Healthcare.
O’Brien, 80, joined Davis after a long career as a corporate economist at HP, Inc.
The remainder of the board’s independent trustees include its chairman, Thomas Gayner, 62; Samuel Iapalucci, 72; Lara Vaughan, 55; and John Gates Jr., 71.
The board’s interested trustees are the Davis brothers, Andrew Davis, 61, and Christopher Davis, 59, who serve as each fund’s president and vice president, respectively.
The funds’ CCO is Michaela McLoughry, 44, who has served in the position since 2023.
With the addition of the Clipper Fund and the Selected Funds, the board will now oversee 16 funds.
The board maintains three standing committees: an audit committee that MacWilliams now chairs following Williams’s departure; a nominating committee chaired by the elder Gayner and a brokerage committee chaired by Gates Jr.
Davis Funds trustees received compensation of $125,000 for the fiscal year ending Oct. 31, 2024; Clipper and Selected Fund trustees received between $92,801 and $110,925 for the same period.
Davis Selected Advisers is a Tuscon, Ariz.-based firm that reported a total of $22.9bn under management as of March 31, 2025.
