As part of my ongoing series focused on ‘big funds you’ve never heard of’, I’d like to draw your attention to... yet another big fund you’ve never heard of. Let’s see if you can guess the fund:
- It was set up in 2005.
- As of today, it has nearly $11 billion in assets under management.
- It is a member of the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds.
Any ideas? No?
- The Central Bank manages the assets on behalf of the Ministry of Finance.
- It derives its assets from Petroleum rents.
- It has been invested very conservatively, but the equity exposure was increased to 20 percent this last year.
Anything? Still nothing?
The mystery fund in this case is the Timor-Leste Petroleum Fund. And for the country of East Timor, it is very important. In fact, the AUM is more than 100 percent of the country’s GDP, and it represents more than $9,000 for each East Timorese citizen. In short, it’s a big deal and the country spends a lot of time trying to ensure that the assets are managed properly.
With this in mind, I enjoyed flipping through this presentation on the PF prepared by Watson Wyatt. In particular, I thought the graphic on page 25 demonstrating how the investment policy has changed over the last seven years was quite interesting...
