All IPE articles in July 2002 (Magazine) – Page 4
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Features
Key features of IORPs
The directive has espoused the prudent man principle with a few minor restrictions on cross-border funds. Member states can choose to retain quantitative rules. Some specific quantitative restrictions can be imposed by a member state not only on its domestic pensions funds but also on pension funds from another state ...
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Features
Levelling the playing field
One of the greatest challenges for real estate investment managers operating internationally is ‘levelling the playing field’. Every market has its own customs and traditions that turn the business of making real estate investments into a complex process. As a result, most skilled international real estate investment managers come equipped ...
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Features
Filling in the gap
The growth of third pillar defined contribution schemes in France has been hampered, historically, by the generosity of the country’s first and second pillar pension systems. The combination of a high level of social security pension and the complementary ‘repartition’ (pay-as-you-go) schemes of ARRCO and AGIRC – mandatory for all ...
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Features
Money flows go property way
Institutions are back in the real estate market. Nothing to do with property, everything to do with the current state of equity markets, says Andrew Jackson, investment director of real estate, Standard Life Investments in Edinburgh. Poor equity performance has led to a reappraisal of real estate by UK institutional ...
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Features
Scottish managers shift focus
Scottish asset managers have always had to look beyond their own national market for their business. South of the border has historically been the major market for the managers from Edinburgh and Glasgow, but some have fished successfully further afield, particularly in North America. Now with the European markets opening ...
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Features
Institutional funds make rapid progress
German investment law provides institutional investors, which are legal entities, the opportunity to organise – in a particularly efficient manner in terms of both management and taxation – their real-property investments already existing in Germany or are going to be effected there. This can be carried out through interposing a ...
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Features
Skandia launches global giant
Skandia, Scandinavia’s largest insurance company, has just launched a global mutual fund company, Skandia Global Funds (SGF). SGF hopes to leverage off Skandia’s worldwide businesses to offer a fund family comprising of 20 sub funds, with the intention of increasing up to 30 by the end of the year. SGF ...
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Features
Giving mobile workers pension wheels
Promoting labour mobility within Europe is one of the central aims of the EU. Yet one large obstacle to this is the portability of supplementary pension rights. A European Commission directive, adopted in 1998, was intended to give supplementary pension rights the same sort of protection as basic pension rights. ...
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Features
Russian pension reform goes on
As the main achievement, the new three-pillar system incorporating the mandatory funded pillar was launched in 1 January 2002. Now 2% out of 28% of pension contributions calculated from the payroll are used for investment purposes. In 2002, all contributions to the funded system go to the public Pension Fund ...
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Features
Make room for gold
It never rains, but it pours. Which, for most of us, is precisely the moment that we remember – with a certain degree of bitterness – how we so nearly picked up our umbrella before rushing out of the door. And so it is with gold. For two decades, the ...
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Features
Lessons in how not to do it
One of the most interesting reports to emerge in Ireland following on from the reserve fund announcement by the government appeared in December 2000. Commissioned by the Irish Association of Pension Funds (IAPF), the report by consultancy Shane F Whelan & Co focused on the possible investment strategies that the ...
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Features
Power to the lay trustees
An extremely important development in the UK pensions industry over the past few years has been a significant change in the role of pension scheme trustees. For example, the Myners report, although highlighting the major issues around the institutional investment market, concluded that trustees are “at the heart of the ...
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Features
Spreading the load
The first tenders to be put out into the market by the NTMA were those to find the advisers that would help it in the mammoth task of implementing a suitable investment strategy, appointing the requisite investment managers, selecting an appropriate custodian and choosing the best transition manager to bring ...
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Features
Long and rocky road
The 1997 Green paper drawn up by internal commissioner Mario Monti is often seen as seminal in getting today’s proposed directive underway. In many ways this is true but the paper, and subsequent discussion, drew heavily on the mistakes and lessons learnt from the first unsuccessful attempt. A fairer assessment ...
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Features
Slipping silently into the markets
While the appointment of 15 investment managers to manage e7bn in assets is in itself no mean feat, the transition of the lion’s share of the assets from cash deposits to market via 14 different investment briefs left the NTMA – in conjunction with Watson Wyatt, the consultant appointed to ...
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Features
Siemens targets Mittelstand plans
With 450,000 employees, Siemens is Europe’s largest employer and ranks among the biggest globally. While the group’s pensions liabilities at E19bn may not be the same as some of the giant US corporations, Siemens has been making determined efforts to put in place a structure that would not just manage ...
