EPFO trustees to appoint fund managers tomorrow

Retirement fund manager EPFO's apex decision making body, Central Board of Trustees, will appoint new managers on Thursday for its huge corpus of Rs 3.5 lakh crore (Rs 3.5 trillion).

"The final recommendations of the Selection Committee and (EPFO's advisory body) Finance and Investment Committee will be placed before the CBT on July 14 for consideration," states the agenda listed for the meeting.

Ahead of the crucial CBT meet, the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation's advisory body Finance and Investment Committee will firm up its view on the matter.

Last month, Central Board of Trustees headed by Labour Minister, had decided to extend the timeline for appointment of the new fund managers to August 31.

EPFO engaged consultant firm Crisil for the appointment of fund managers.

The credit ratings agency was to open financial bids on July 8, a Labour Ministry official said, adding that if everything goes well the managers will be appointed on Thursday.

He said giving reasonable time for submitting technical and financial bids, on June 6 the EPFO had asked the 10 asset management companies who had earlier evinced interest in managing its funds, to submit their bids by June 24.

The term of the four fund managers, including ICICI Pru, HSBC AMC, Reliance Capital and SBI had expired on March 31

this year.

Besides the four AMCs who had managed EPFO corpus, six new firms had evinced interest in managing the retirement fund manager's corpus.

The six firms are Kotak Mahindra Asset Management Company, Securities Trading Corporation of India, UTI Asset Management Company, Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company, ICICI Securities Primary Dealership and Franklin Templeton Asset Management (India) Pvt Ltd.

The EPFO had appointed multiple fund managers for the first time in July, 2008 for earning better rate of return on deposits for its 4.72 crore (47.2 million) subscribers.

Prior to this, State Bank of India was the sole fund manager for the retirement fund body since its inception in 1952.