EUROPE - State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) has been awarded a £45m (€50m) passive UK and global equities mandate by the £241m London Borough of Havering local government pension scheme (LGPS).

The mandate, first tendered this time last year, was intended to keep the fund's equity allocation stable at 60%. However, the investments managed by Alliance Bernstein and Standard Life have been reduced as a consequence.

A second, smaller, multi-asset absolute return mandate has been awarded to Ruffer.

Tendered at the same time as the first mandate, this mandate is valued at £14m-16m and calls for a pooled vehicle, utilising derivatives.

The benchmark was expected to be based on the London Interbank Offered Rate, set between 3% and 5% over a maximum period of five years.

Meanwhile, the London Borough of Hillingdon has awarded a £22.5m global infrastructure mandate to Macquarie Capital Funds.

Macquarie will initially be granted the £22.5m mandate, but may see it increase to 10% of fund assets at the time of the original tender notice, resulting in a doubling of assets.

However, as the tender notice was published in 2009, it was based on March 2009 figures, which valued the fund at £417m. The latest annual report states funds have risen to £561m as at the end of March.

In other news, the £4.6bn Merseyside LGPS has announced four mandate awards for Asia Pacific, Japanese and emerging market equity.

The Asia Pacific mandates were awarded to BlackRock and Maple-Brown Abbott, while the two new emerging market mandates will be overseen by Amundi and M&G Investments.

Nomura, which currently oversees the Japanese equity mandate totalling 4% of funds, will retain its role.

Peter Wallach, head of the Merseyside pension fund, said: "As committed signatories to the UNPRI, we are pleased to be able to appoint investment managers who have all demonstrated a clear-sighted awareness of the significance of ESG issues to investment management and the importance of fulfilling a stewardship role in the companies in which they invest."

He added that the tender procedure, overseen by JLT Investment Consulting, demonstrated that following proper procedure of putting mandates out to tender need not result in a change for the sake of change.

"For the Japanese mandate, the exercise confirmed that Nomura remained the best-placed manager to fulfil this role," Wallach said.

Finally, J O Hambro Capital Management recently won a €100m pan-European equities mandate from Industriens Pensionsforsikring.

The Danish labour market scheme recently posted 14.5% growth for the first six months of the year, bringing total assets to DKK89.6bn (€12bn).