Kazakhstan National Fund seeking investment managers

business and economy

Kazakhstan National Fund seeking investment managers

By SRI ⋅ June 24, 2009 ⋅

(SRI) - Kazakhstan National Fund, the country’s rainy day fund which accumulates excess tax revenues from oil and gas and other extractive industries, is seeking two investment managers to run its global equity and fixed-income portfolios, the industry journal Pension & Investments reported.

The total mandate for the two portfolios is $400 million, split evenly between active and passive strategies, and the funding will come from recently terminated investment managers. Anvar Izbassarov, chief of the risk and analysis division at the National Bank of Kazakhstan, declined to name the terminated investment managers or give a reason on why they were terminated.

Part of the new external managers’ responsibilities will reportedly be to act as “an adviser on model building, risk management, technology, systems and other (related) issues,” according to the Fund’s Requests for Proposal (RFPs).

The National Fund, managed by the National Bank of Kazakhstan, reportedly consists of two separate overall portfolio - a stabilization portfolio, benchmarked to the Merrill Lynch 6-month US Treasury Bill Index, and a savings portfolio, benchmarked to the Salomon World Government Bonds Index and the MSCI World Index (excluding energy). According to the investment mandate, the stabilization portfolio makes up at least 20 percent of the entire fund, while the savings portfolio makes up the remainder.

In 2008, the National Fund recorded a negative return of 2.28 percent, while its cumulative performance since inception was 44.43 percent as of the end of 2008.