US - Calpers, the US’s largest public pension fund, may have to reveal the performance data and stocks of its 20 billion dollars of private equity investments, after making the information secret last year.

The Californian public employees’ retirement system was taken to court in October by the San Jose Mercury News, claiming that, having once made the information publicly available, the fund is legally bound to continue to disclose performance.

In a court hearing last Thursday a judge ruled that Calpers would indeed have to report the data from individual private equity partnerships as is was not a trade secret, and has given the fund three weeks to argue why the data should be kept confidential.

At the time, the judge ruled that, although performance should be disclosed, Calpers did not have to reveal the names and valuations of the individual companies in which it has invested.

But it has come to light since the hearing that this information was made available last year. So, according to public law, it should therefore be available now – which could leave Calpers in an awkward situation.

Although the news is likely to raise questions among European pension funds with large allocations in private equity about their own disclosure methods, Peter Baynham, European partner at Mercer Manager Advisory Services believes Calpers’ situation will have a limited impact on its European counterparts.

“In general, people take a lot of interest in what Calpers does, but this doesn’t therefore mean that European pension funds will feel they have to disclose details of their private equity holdings,” says Baynham.

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