UK - Suffolk County Council Pension Fund has awarded three mandates to manage its equity investments, following a change in allocation strategy.

Newton Investment Management and JP Morgan have each been signed to manage global equity mandates worth £170.5m (€253.8m) or 13.2% of the fund while BlackRock will manage a £85.3m UK equity mandate, 6.6% of the pension fund's assets.

Peter Edwards, corporate finance manager at Suffolk County Council, said these latest allocations are the result of a strategic investment review last autumn which saw the pension fund, assisted by consultancy firm Hyman Robertson, shift its equity weighting from a 50/50 split in UK and global equities to 40% in UK equities and 60% on a global basis.

The pension fund also used Lehman Bros for this one-off transition management requirement but is still searching for a currency overlay manager, said Edwards, having begun its search for a currency manager last autumn.

Elsewhere, the London Borough of Ealing pension scheme has asked BNY Global Transition Management to provide transition management services to the £550m fund.

Nigel Watson, head of strategic finance at the London Borough of Ealing said it had hired BNY following a complex trial brief as the borough team found transition processes "time consuming and complex" and would therefore be better managed by a specialist in multi-asset class transactions.

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