The £5bn (E8.1bn) Bradford-based West Yorkshire Pension Fund, the scheme for local government workers in the region, has appointed a raft of private equity managers as part of a move to increase venture assets to around four per cent of the fund’s portfolio in the next few years.
The briefs, totalling around £63m, were spread between UK and European funds, as well as a number of fund-of-funds arrangements.
Barclays Private Equity picked up £10m to be run in the Barclays private equity European fund. JPMorgan scooped £13m to invest in the Chase Capital Fund 2001. HarbourVest landed £15m to run through its International Private Equity Partners Four Fund.
On the fund-of-funds side, Schroders will invest £10m while Goldman Sachs garnered assets of £15m for its fund of funds arrangement.
Diane Mitchell, senior investment officer at the fund, comments: “Basically we wanted to get a spread of types of private equity between the direct and the mixed and UK and Europe for reasons of diversification.”
She adds that the fund is progressively increasing its private equity exposure from the current level of 0.6% of assets.
“We’ve decided that we are going to get to 2% of assets in private equity by the end of this year and increase it to 3/4% in the next couple of years.”
The manager selection process was carried out in-house by the fund.

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