NORWAY – The 803 billion-crown (99.4 billion-euro) Petroleum Fund is seeking managers to run active global and emerging market equities.

“We will now appoint new external active managers for emerging market equity and global equity,” said Norges Bank Investment Management, which runs the fund for the Norwegian government.

“We haven’t defined an amount,” said senior portfolio manager Bengt Enge. He said the fund would put between 50-250 million dollars into emerging markets and between 100-300 million dollars into global equities. “These are ballpark figures,” he stressed.

Some of the cash would be reallocated from its enhanced index portfolio. “We are looking for more active risk,” Enge said.

This week the largest US fund CalPERS said it was looking to invest up to 20% of its 90 billion-dollar equities portfolio in enhanced index strategies.

Forty per cent of the Petroleum Fund is invested in global equities. Currently, 39 mandates totalling 21.2 billion dollars are managed by 17 different managers.

NBIM says it is looking to hire one or more managers to manage emerging market equity mandates. The regions are: Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, China, Malaysia and Indonesia); Latin America (Brazil, Mexico and Chile); Europe (Turkey, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary) and South Africa.

The mandates are subject to the new markets being approved by the Norwegian Ministry of Finance. The deadline for applications is December 31.

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