Posts tagged 'SWF'

Beijing and Moscow to put $1bn each in fund

| Oct 11 2011 21:37 | Comment |

China’s main sovereign wealth fund will invest $1bn with its Russian counterpart, giving the Russian Direct Investment Fund its first capital commitment since it was established in June, reports the FT. The agreement was signed in Beijing on Tuesday at a meeting between Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier, and the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, who is in China for his first overseas visit since announcing his intention to reclaim the Russian presidency next year. China Investment Corp and RDIF will both contribute $1bn to a new Russia-China Investment Fund, which is also hoping to raise an additional $2bn from other Chinese investors. Read more

The Sovereign’s Wealth Fund

| Jul 01 2011 12:30 | Comment |

Poor Queen.

The House of Saud controls the world’s largest oil reserves, and with them, a tidy annual revenue stream of about $200bn. Read more

Sovereign wealth, a Gulf ‘supply chain’ risk

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Mar 16 2011 15:22 | Comment |

From our field research, it would appear that the Gulf States assumed that breaking with the past by adopting the SWF institution was preferable to remaking their inherited institutions. By this logic, the SWF is symbolic of a commitment among the Gulf states to adopt the instruments of advanced financial management to facilitate the modernisation of what were otherwise semi-feudal states. The SWF is more than just a tool for managing resource wealth; it is a step towards modernity and economic development…

According to official literature and formal communications, the process of SWF adoption appears to be going extremely well. On the surface, these funds are operating like any other globally-oriented financial institution… Upon deeper examination, interviews with current and former financial market-oriented employees at Gulf States’ SWFs have identified a variety of problems with these official characterizations. Read more

GCC launches a Sovereign Health Fund for Bahrain and Oman

| Mar 10 2011 18:41 | Comment |

You’re familiar with SWFs — and the damage they can cause in the wrong hands — but on Thursday Bloomberg carried news of what we’ll call a Sovereign Health Fund (SHF):

The Gulf Cooperation Council plans to set up a fund worth more than $10 billion, Kuwait’s foreign minister said, to help the rulers of Bahrain and Oman appease popular protest movements. Read more

The great Gaddafi cash call

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Mar 10 2011 12:21 | Comment |

By this point, the assets of the Libyan Investment Authority are frozen in just about every major financial jurisdiction. Except, of course, Libya.

So, a quick question. Is a sovereign wealth fund financing a war? Read more

Further further reading

Cardiff writes mostly about US macroeconomic issues, with daily excursions into other topics about which he claim no expertise. Before Alphaville, Cardiff spent a little more than two years as a reporter at Dow Jones Financial News covering investment banking, asset management, and private equity. Along the way he has written freelance pieces on a variety of other topics from behavioural psychology to Muay Thai, the latter also being a personal interest that involves frequently getting kicked in the shins (and torso, and head).

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| Mar 09 2011 20:57 | Comment |

For the commute home, and to help you qualify the recovery,

- David Wessel spots three storm clouds in the US recovery: oil, rich-country government policy, and emerging market slowdown. Read more

Why Libya’s sovereign fund is being frozen

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Mar 04 2011 10:15 | Comment |

Austria was the latest country to freeze assets linked to the Libyan Investment Authority on Friday, FT Alphaville reports. Or more specifically — assets tied to Mustafa Zarti, who is the LIA’s deputy chief. And a close friend of Saif Gaddafi. Which tells you exactly why an asset freeze initially targeted at the Gaddafi family has now also brought down a sovereign wealth fund. Given the LIA’s size, liquidity, and counterparty exposure to several western companies, this is a big deal — and so far as we still know, an unprecedented occurrence in the land of SWFs. Read more

Gaddafi’s sovereign fund — FROZEN

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Mar 01 2011 11:42 | Comment |

No stock dividend for Colonel Gaddafi — and a stunning precedent for sovereign wealth funds — from Pearson, publishers of the FT and FT Alphaville, on Tuesday. From a statement:

Pearson plc announced on 7 June 2010 that it had received notification that the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) had acquired 24,431,000 ordinary shares in the company. On further investigation, Pearson has reasonable cause to believe that the LIA may have acquired an additional 2,141,179 shares resulting in a total interest in 26,572,179 shares. This represents 3.27% of the company’s issued share capital. Read more

Gaddafi exposure, via a SWF

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Feb 21 2011 16:00 | Comment |

Can political unrest bring down a sovereign wealth fund?

It might pay to ask the question on Monday for a number of companies who have the Libya Investment Authority on their holders lists. Read more

SWFs, plotted

Cardiff writes mostly about US macroeconomic issues, with daily excursions into other topics about which he claim no expertise. Before Alphaville, Cardiff spent a little more than two years as a reporter at Dow Jones Financial News covering investment banking, asset management, and private equity. Along the way he has written freelance pieces on a variety of other topics from behavioural psychology to Muay Thai, the latter also being a personal interest that involves frequently getting kicked in the shins (and torso, and head).

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| Jan 24 2011 20:52 | Comment |

Courtesy of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institue:

 Read more

Mubadala invests $500m in Carlyle

| Dec 17 2010 05:22 | Comment |

Mubadala Development, an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, is increasing its stake in Carlyle, the US private equity group, in a $500m investment that will also see it take on convertible subordinated notes, reports the FT. The deal highlights Carlyle’s search for strategic investors as it prepares for an initial public offering. Other big private equity firms, such as TPG, are considering similar approaches and have been in talks with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. Both Carlyle and Apollo Management, which is also planning a New York listing, have sold stakes in themselves to Calpers, the Californian pension fund. Carlyle’s latest deal with Mubadala follows an initial $1.35bn investment in 2007, in which the Abu Dhabi fund took a 7.5% stake. Read more

ACS sweetens offer for Hochtief

| Dec 16 2010 05:14 | Comment |

ACS of Spain on Wednesday sweetened its offer for Hochtief, hours after the German construction company formally rejected what it had described as a hostile, lowball bid to gradually take control, reports the FT. Spain’s biggest engineering group said it would offer nine ACS shares for every five in Hochtief, instead of its initial eight-for-five offer announced in September. The move came as Herbert Lütkestratkötter, Hochtief’s CEO, reversed his refusal to meet ACS and said talks would commence soon. ACS’s revised bid followed Hochtief’s deal last week to sell 10% of new equity to a Qatari investment fund. The WSJ notes that already, the bid is testing Germany’s tolerance for foreign acquisitions in key industries. Read more

Release the hounds, er, Irish SWF!

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Nov 24 2010 15:01 | Comment |

Ireland’s prime minister was busy introducing his post-bailout government’s four-year fiscal plan at pixel time.

There is a lot to chew on. For starters, the questionable assumption that 2.5 per cent GNP growth will cushion fiscal cuts right up to 2014. Read more

Abu Dhabi fund eyes Europe deals

| Nov 15 2010 01:20 | Comment |

Aabar, one of oil-rich Abu Dhabi’s most active investment vehicles, has sold its stake in Banco Santander’s Brazilian unit, as it seeks investments in European infrastructure, western telecoms companies and agricultural assets. Khadem al-Qubaisi, chairman of the state-controlled Aabar, told the FT the fund was considering two European infrastructure investments, each valued between €500m ($685m) and €1bn, and a ‘small stake’ in a blue-chip telecoms company in Europe or the US. He also disclosed that Aabar’s parent company, International Petroleum Investment Co, considered buying up to 10% of BP after an approach by Tony Hayward, then chief executive, following the UK oil major’s Gulf spill disaster. But IPIC backed off when BP said would sell shares in the open market. Read more

The world backs away from Ireland, Spain, Portugal

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Nov 04 2010 09:15 | Comment |

There’s something missing from the Russian Finance Ministry’s website.

Via Google Translate: Read more

The self-denying sovereign wealth fund

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Sep 15 2010 17:47 | Comment |

This is – in a way - yet another of those posts commemorating the fall of Lehman Brothers, two years ago to the day.

Then again — the post-Lehman sovereign wealth fund really has become something to behold, given the past two years of change. Read more

Norwegian fund boosts eurozone

| Sep 10 2010 04:31 | Comment |

Eurozone bond markets gained a significant boost after one of the world’s biggest investors stepped up purchases in the second quarter of debt of the troubled peripheral economies of Greece, Portugal and Ireland, reports the FT. The move by Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s second-biggest SWF with $450bn of assets under management, followed a volatile week for eurozone markets. But analysts warned that the bond markets of the weakest economies were still vulnerable amid continuing worries that one or more will default. Read more

Morgan Stanley’s Chinese irony

| Sep 01 2010 09:41 | Comment |

Morgan Stanley’s word of the week in China has to be “irony”, as news emerged late on Tuesday that the US Federal Reserve has given the go-ahead for China Investment Corp, the country’s main sovereign wealth fund, to buy up to 10 per cent of voting shares in the US bank.

As Forbes reports: Read more

Adventures in equity knife-catching, SWF edition (updated)

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| Aug 13 2010 17:40 | Comment |

If you’re a BP investor who thought twice about catching the falling knife of the firm’s post-Gulf spill shares this summer — well, spare a thought for Norway.

Thanks to the government’s sovereign wealth fund, it’s faced a similar dilemma. Read more

Kuwait also sticking with eurozone debt

Joseph joined FT Alphaville way back in March 2010. He likes all the politically and legally fiddly bits of finance. He also likes credit, rates, global macro, tail risk, and all that stuff. (You should email him story ideas. He’ll take anything.)

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| May 27 2010 14:29 | Comment |

Are we going to have to go through all the sovereign wealth funds? On Thursday, China’s CIC roundly denied the FT’s report that it has sought to reduce its exposure to eurozone debt.

This was followed by a similar statement from the Kuwait Investment Authority, which denied a local media report that it was cutting back. Via Reuters: Read more

Asian SWFs target US shale gas

| May 20 2010 05:09 | Comment |

The sovereign wealth funds of China and South Korea are set to lead a $900m investment in a top US producer of shale gas, becoming the latest Asia-based groups to focus on the sector, reports the FT. CIC and Korea Investment Corp are in advanced talks to join a consortium planning to acquire convertible preferred stock in New York-listed Chesapeake Energy. The talks follow last week’s news that Singapore’s Temasek and Chinese buy-out firm Hopu had acquired $600m of Chesapeake’s convertible preferred stock. Read more

Dubai buy-out head goes to Carlyle

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Apr 06 2010 03:44 | Comment |

Carlyle, the US-based private equity group, has poached Eric Kump, head of Dubai International Capital’s European private equity team, leaving the sovereign wealth fund with a troubled portfolio and lacking funds for new deals, the FT reports. Mr Kump will on Tuesday be unveiled by Carlyle as a new managing director in its European buy-out team, only two years after the 39-year-old was hired by DIC. Read more

Oil groups urge Indian SWF

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Mar 18 2010 03:02 | Comment |

India is facing demands from the local state-owned oil industry to create the country’s first sovereign wealth fund to compete with China in the race to secure global energy assets, according to government and industry officials. Elsewhere the Opec oil cartel on Wednesday kept its production quotas unchanged, as ministers flipped from worrying about oil prices falling too far to becoming wary of them rising too high. Read more

How to say ‘more please’ in Chinese

| Feb 03 2010 10:20 | Comment |

For a prime example of investor chutzpah, look no further than China Investment Corp, the country’s mega sovereign wealth fund, which has just done a deal with Apax to invest €685m (£599m) in the UK private equity group’s €11.2bn buy-out fund.

Even after heavy domestic criticism – and some international derision – for spending $3bn two years ago to acquire 10 per cent of Blackstone just before shares in the US buy-out group tanked – CIC has come roaring back with a big appetite for big deals. This after sitting on the sidelines for most of last year with about 90 per cent of its available funds in cash. Read more

A Thai SWF? More if than when.

| Feb 03 2010 09:00 | Comment |

Back in December, Thai prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva told attendees at a conference in Bangkok that the country’s central bank has been considering setting up a sovereign wealth fund.

According to a report in AsianInvestor, PM Vejjajiva believed a sovereign wealth fund would allow the Bank of Thailand to have “more flexible management of surplus reserves”: Read more

Another injection planned for China’s SWF

Paul Murphy is the founding editor of FT Alphaville.

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| Dec 21 2009 05:00 | Comment |

China Investment Corp, the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, is expected to receive a fresh injection of capital from the country’s foreign exchange reserves in the coming months, according to government officials and other sources. While a final decision has yet to be made, CIC is said to be likely receive a similar amount to the initial $200bn it was given on its establishment in 2007. Read more

SWF datapoint du jour

FT Hedge Fund Correspondent

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| Feb 03 2009 17:27 | Comment |

Built on the oil revenue that’s transformed Norway into one of the richest and best places to live on the planet, the fund lost 14.5 percent of its value through September. The third quarter was the worst in its 18-year history.

- reports Bloomberg, on the performance of Norway’s $300bn sovereign wealth fund. We’d be curious to know just how other SWFs were faring. A quick check back at Paul Kedrosky’s  SWF loss live widget from way way back in March reveals a host of nasty numbers across big-name investments. A loss of 80 per cent or more seems de rigueur. Read more

Mon petit complex Napoleon

FT Hedge Fund Correspondent

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| Nov 21 2008 08:09 | Comment |

Abu Dhabi – $875bn

Norway – $391bn Read more

Sarkozy plans new French wealth fund

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Oct 24 2008 04:09 | Comment |

Nicolas Sarkozy said France would set up a new “strategic investment fund” to stop French companies from falling into the hands of foreign “predators”. The new fund will be operated by Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations — the country’s existing sovereign wealth fund – but would be “more active, more offensive, more mobile”, France’s President said yesterday. Seperately, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso called for an “unprecedented” exercise in global co-operation to deal with the current international financial crisis. Read more

Sarkozy calls for European wealth funds

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Oct 22 2008 04:53 | Comment |

France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy called yesterday for the creation of European sovereign wealth funds to buy stakes in companies with low share prices and protect them from foreign predators. His proposal underlines how some European Union leaders are seizing on the financial crisis as a calamity that exposes the failure of US-style free markets and justifies a return to the state’s traditionally strong role in European economic policy. The IMF has warned that European businesses will suffer a sharp contraction in credit next year as the full consequences of the global crisis unfold for non-financial companies. Read more

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