EUROPE - The European Commission has awarded a contract to Luxembourg-based La Mondiale Europartner to manage an estimated €2.75m of accumulated unpaid pension contributions for conference interpreters.

The contributions represent 8.25% of interpreters' daily fees and allowances and 16.5% of the fee contributed by the institution.

La Mondiale Europartner, which specialises in multi-currency group pension contracts, will manage a pension scheme for 569 conference interpreters not covered by existing pension plans.

The scheme will also be open to interpreters who want to change pension plans.

In other news, London Borough of Havering Pension Fund is looking to appoint a minimum of eight global equities managers within a £60m-70m framework agreement.

The four-year contract will involve "a number of unconstrained, long-only active global equity managers" that will be expected to outperform the MSCI AC World index.

Performance will be measured over rolling three-year periods.

Single or multiple mandates may be awarded concurrently or consecutively within the four-year framework.

However, the pension fund warns that managers appointed to the framework will not necessarily be awarded a mandate.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England is scouting an actuary for its non-contributory defined benefits pension fund.

The successful bidder for the £900,000-1.5m contract will be expected to value the scheme according to IAS19 and perform triennial and interim valuations.

The appointed actuary will also provide advice to the central bank and its pension scheme on tax and regulation, compliance, investment and governance.

Depending on the actuary's performance, the three-year contract comes with two possible three-year extensions.

Finally, the University of Reading Pension Scheme has appointed BlackRock to provide a full proposition of investment funds, administration and member communications for its defined contribution (DC) scheme.

Employees over the age of 22 are now auto-enrolled into the DC scheme after the university's final salary arrangement was closed to new entrants on 1 August.

The university chose six BlackRock funds for the scheme, including the DC Diversified Growth Plus fund, a multi-asset strategy that will account for half of the investment allocation during the "growth phase" of the scheme's default investment option.

The portfolio targets a return above the Bank of England official Bank Rate of +4.5% over rolling three-year periods.