The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) has tapped investment veterans from Norway to New Zealand to pull together a six-member investment committee for the State’s two new sovereign wealth funds.
Knut Kjaer, the founding chief executive of Norges Investment Bank Investment Management, which oversees Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and Matt Winerary, chairman of the New Zealand asset manager, FirstCape Group, will be among the team tasked with drawing up an investment strategy for the fledgling Irish funds which have been set up to capture and invest windfall tax revenues.
The funds are called the Future Ireland Fund and Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund. Mr Kjaer previously served on the commission that managed the long-defunct Irish National Pensions Reserve Fund (NPRF), which was raided during the financial crisis to help cover the costs of bailing out the banks.
The NTMA has also appointed Anne Gram, a sustainable investments specialist who is also currently serving on the investment committees of Dutch and Danish state pension funds, and Deborah Reidy, a former head of investment manager selection at NPRF.
The committee is rounded off by two members of the NTMA’s board, John Daly, a one-time chairman of global equity capital markets at Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs and Gerardine Jones, former deputy chief executive at Cantor Fitzgerald Ireland.
The Government started to pump billions of euro into the two new funds in September, initially into low-risk bonds and cash, pending the appointment of the investment committee to come up with a long-term investment strategy for both.
The Department of Finance estimates that the bigger of the two funds, the Future Investment Fund, which is being set up to pay for additional healthcare and pension costs associated with a growing and ageing population from 2041, currently has €8.4 billion of assets. It is forecast by the department to grow to €100 billion by 2035.
The Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund, seen growing from €2 billion currently to €14 billion by the end of this decade, is designed to ensure that capital spending on infrastructure and climate action projects is maintained in the event of a future economic shock.
The NTMA appointed Rebekah Brady, deputy director and head of investments at the agency’s Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, the successor to the NPRF, last month as director of the new Future Ireland Funds unit, home to the two new funds.
Following the outlining of an investment strategy, the investment committee will move to hire various international fund managers to run portfolios, expected to span, over time, equities and bonds to real estate and private equity.
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