UK - The £258m (€332m) Isle of Wight pension fund is seeking five new investment managers for a range of contracts including property, bonds and equities.

Isle of Wight County Council is seeking a manager to look after a single passive multi-asset mandate worth up to 40% of the fund’s assets - including all of UK equities, regional overseas equities and sterling bonds but not property - although it expects an initial allocation of around 20% of assets, equivalent to £47m.

In addition, the pension fund is seeking an active UK equity manager to run a portfolio valued at up to £94m, or 40% of assets, although the mandate may be split between more than one manager as the council confirmed it would consider all active approaches including enhanced indexation, core and higher performance target.

The fund is also tendering a contract for an active global equity including UK, or diversified growth or multi-asset mandate valued at up to £118m although the council added it would consider combining a global equity or multi-asset mandate with a diversified alternatives mandate.

The Isle of Wight pension fund is also seeking an active bond manager to run a portfolio valued at up to £70m, along with a pooled property contract of UK and/or global property assets in either a single fund or fund-of-fund approaches for a mandate valued at around £25m.

The Isle of Wight fund currently employs Schroders Investment Management to run the scheme’s assets, which have an asset allocation of 71.6% in equities, 17.1% in bonds, 4.7% in cash and the remaining 6.6% in property.

Latest figures from the draft statement of accounts for 2007/08 showed at the end of March 2008 the pension fund was valued at £258m, a fall of 1.3% from £261.4m in March 2007, following a negative return of -3.1% - slightly higher than the benchmark yield of -3.6%. 

The contracts are all for an initial period of five years, and the closing date for submissions to any or all tenders is 10 November 2008.

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