London’s £1bn (€1.3bn) Greenwich local authority pension fund has awarded two of four mandates it has tendered since November last year as part of the implementation of a new strategic asset allocation.
It awarded the largest, a £400m passive global equity mandate, to BlackRock, while Partners Group won a £100m diversified alternatives mandate.
Both mandates were tendered in November, the equity one shortly after the alternatives mandate, as previously reported.
The pension fund had at the time indicated that the diversified alternatives mandate would be for around £100m; the notice announcing Partners Group as the selected manager did not give a final value.
According to meeting documents, the decision to select Partners Group and BlackRock was taken at an early February meeting of the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s pension fund investment and administration panel.
Investment consultants Hymans Robertson presented a report on manager selection, with the investment managers themselves presenting to the panel in closed session.
The pension fund for the Royal Borough of Greenwich has also been searching for a manager for a £100m emerging market portfolio, as well as a manager to run a £100m absolute return mandate.
The deadlines for these were early and late February. A spokeperson for the borough told IPE that these mandates had yet to be awarded.
Partners Group’s bid for the alternatives mandate was chosen out of 22 offers.
In the initial tender information, the pension fund sought to invest in a range of alternative assets, citing real assets such as infrastructure and timberland, as well as alternatives funds that include exposure to active currency management or commodities.
BlackRock, meanwhile, has been hired to manage a passive equity mandate that will be split between tracking market-cap-weighted indices such as the FTSE All Share, and a non-market-cap, fundamentally weighted global equity index such as the FTSE RAFI 3000.
Greenwich received eight offers to run the new equity mandate.
When the scheme tendered the passive equity mandate, State Street and BlackRock were the fund’s global equity managers.
The newly awarded mandates and outstanding emerging market tender are part of a new strategic asset allocation the fund agreed in February last year.
It decided to allocate 10% of assets to diversified alternatives and a further 10% to a multi-asset strategy, as well as to increase its overall equity allocation slightly.
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