UPDATE 2-Ex-M.Stanley Asia debt head readies hedge fund

By Nishant Kumar

Feb 16 (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley's former head of fixed income for Asia-Pacific, Ranodeb Roy, is preparing to launch a hedge fund that will focus on liquid Asian interest rates, credit and foreign exchange, he told Reuters on Thursday.

Singapore-based RV Capital Management that Roy is setting up with Vickram Mangalgiri, a former adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co., will start trading in April or May.

"It's a top-down driven strategy utilising dislocations that come in the market," Roy, who was earlier based in Hong Kong, said in a telephone interview from Singapore.

He said events such as Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008, European debt crisis and Japanese tsunami last year caused massive dislocations in Asian markets, some justified and some not justified.

"My idea is to pick up some of these assets which are not justified," said Roy, who is joined by Rajesh Mahadevan, former head of interest rate and foreign exchange structuring in South Asia for BNP Paribas, as head of trading strategy.

The launch comes in a tough capital-raising environment for the industry, with regional hedge funds seeing outflows in each of the last four months of last year, according to data from industry tracker Eurekahedge.

Roy declined to disclose the startup capital for the hedge fund but said it has the capacity to take in about $1 billion.

"I was just on the road for the last one month and it's too early to tell about size," he said.

"We will start off small."

Roy, who departed from Merrill Lynch in 2007 after the bank wrote down $8.4 billion in the third quarter of that year from exposure to subprime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations, joined Morgan Stanley in March 2008.