EPFO to appoint fund managers tomorrow

DELHI: The Central Board of Trustees, the EPFO’s top decision making body, will meet on Thursday to appoint new fund managers for the fund’s over Rs 3 lakh crore corpus. Ten asset management companies including Birla Sun Life, UTI, SBI, ICICI Prudential, HSBC, Reliance Capital, STCI, Kotak Mahindra, Franklin Templeton and ICICI Securities are in the race for the four available posts.

For determinig the best value bids, the EPFO, which has over 4.72 crore subscribers, has decided to give 80% weightage to technical bids and 20% weightage to financial bids. The term of the fund’s four managers ICICI Pru, HSBC AMC, Reliance Capital and SBI appointed in July 2008 expired on March 31 2011. SBI was given the sole responsibility of managing the fund till August 31 2011 or till the time the new fund managers got appointed.

The CBT will also consider the proposal for authorising the labour minister, who chairs the CBT, to approve appointment of the custodian of securities for EPFO securities and new concurrent auditor of portfolio managers of the fund. This would allow approvals to be given as soon as all bids are opened by the end of next week as a full-fledged CBT meeting would bot have to be convened.