John Meriwether's hedge fund firm JWM Partners LLC plans to close his current hedge fund, which lost 44 percent from September 2007 to February 2009, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

JWM is closing its main Relative Value Opportunity II fund.

which was started after Meriwether's previous hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, collapsed and had to accept a $3.6 billion bailout by U.S. banks in 1998 after it ran aground due to leveraged trading strategies.

The Relative Value Opportunity II fund returned an average of 1.46 percent a year since it began trading in Nov 1999, the report said, while the Credit Suisse/Tremont Hedge Fixed-Income Arbitrage Index gained 2.4 percent a year in the same period.

JWM could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters. JWM Partners, based in Greenwich, Connecticut, managed about $1 billion at the beginning of 2008, Bloomberg said.

The news agency said JWM's London chiefAdrian Eterovic plans to start his own fund. Eterovic registered Episteme Capital Partners (U.K.) LLP with the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority, the report said.

Episteme could not be immediately reached for comment.

(Reporting by Hezron Selvi in Bangalore; Editing by Valerie Lee)

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