UK / ITALY – Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP) has won a mandate to manage the €25m active Japanese equity portfolio of Cassa dei Geometri, the Italian professional surveyors’ pension fund.

The mandate is SWIP’s first Italian segregated account and is part of a series of institutional fund launches to take place later this year. There will be three new equity funds- pan-European small caps, pan-European large caps and global ex-Europe- the size of which have yet to be determined

They will be implemented geographically in three stages from September. The first launch will be in Scandinavia, followed by Italy and then Spain

Chris Walker, head of the institutional division at SWIP says that these are the three short-term priority areas outside the UK and Middle East. “The strategy we have adopted is to concentrate on those areas where we show our best performance,” he says.

Cassa dei Geometri has assets of €750m and managers other than SWIP include Axa, ABN Amro and Italian firms Pioneer and Fineco. SWIP has £80bn (€130bn) under management