Kuwait Pension Fund Plans to Triple Infrastructure Investments
Kuwait Pension Fund Plans to Triple Infrastructure Investments
(Bloomberg) --
Kuwait’s $112 billion pension fund is looking to more than triple investments in infrastructure as part of its asset-allocation strategy over the next couple of years.
“In infrastructure, we’re looking to build up aggressively,” Meshal Al-Othman, director general of the Public Institution for Social Security, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday. “We’re at 3% today. We’re taking that up to roughly 10%.”
It will also “slightly increase” investments in hedge funds and real estate, he said.
Al-Othman is part of a new management team brought in during 2017 to transform the state-owned institution after a corruption scandal involving a previous manager. The fund has since exited more than $20 billion in questionable deals in a major reorganization of its portfolio.
PIFSS, as the fund is known, had a record investment profit of $7.3 billion in the three months through June, an almost fourfold increase from a year earlier. It aims to have 12% to 17% of its portfolio in real estate, followed by private equity at between 8% and 13%.
The team inherited a portfolio with a “humongous” 40% sitting in cash, Al-Othman said. This is now at 11.5% of its investments, which the fund aims to reduce to 4% by March.
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