The £1.7bn (€2.2bn) Molson Coors UK Pension Plan has increased its allocation to absolute return bond funds, investing the additional allocation entirely with Kames Capital.

The brewer’s UK pension plan already had £100m invested in absolute return bond funds via Kames Capital, which was awarded the original mandate in 2015.

The corporate’s legacy defined benefit plan is running a long-term de-risking programme.

In connection with this, it recently increased its allocation to absolute return bond funds from 15% to 19.5%.

Oliver Polson, pensions manager for UK and Ireland at Molson Coors UK, said that, with the additional allocation, Kames would oversee more than half of the pension plan’s total absolute return bond investments.

In other news, BlackRock has been given permission to invest an additional RMB20bn (€2.7bn) in Chinese onshore stocks and bonds under the government’s Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (RQFII) programme.

The additional award, assigned to BlackRock’s Singapore-regulated subsidiary, takes the total amount of China investment quotas allocated to BlackRock entities to more than $4.9bn (€4.4bn).

Ryan Stork, chairman at BlackRock Asia Pacific, said: “The ongoing programme of capital markets reform is vital to international investors wishing to gain access to the world’s second-largest economy, notably the steps taken to broaden global investors’ participation in onshore fixed income and equity markets.”

The decision by the Chinese authorities comes two weeks before index provider MSCI decides whether to include mainland Chinese shares, called A-shares, in its benchmark emerging market index.

Last year, MSCI decided against doing so due, as it considered there were still too many restrictions governing foreign investment in China.

The Ontario Pension Board and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board late last year became the first pension funds to obtain an RQFII licence to access China’s mainland capital markets.  

Lastly, the London-based global fixed income team of Japan’s Nikko Asset Management has recently secured a number of Japanese institutional mandates, mainly for US fixed income.

There has been a significant increase in demand for global fixed income products from Japanese institutional clients, according to Nikko, after the Japanese central bank moved to negative interest rates in January, taking government bonds into negative yield territory.

No further information about the recent Nikko mandate wins was available at the time of publication.

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