Ghana pension funds safe from ‘managers’

Bloomberg

Ghana’s pension funds are safe from the crisis engulfing money managers caught in the aftermath of a banking-industry cleanup.
“The only way some may have been affected is if they made fixed-term investments with some of the banks that were shut down,” Hayford Attah Krufi, chief executive officer of the National Pensions Regulatory Authority, said. “But, because the government bailed out depositors, the investments are safe.”
The West African nation’s markets regulator is investigating 21 fund managers for investing as much a 5 billion cedis ($903 million) in hard-to-liquidate assets such as unlisted bonds, direct private-equity deals and related-party transactions. The investments were exposed after the central bank in 2017 started weeding out weaker lenders, triggering panicked withdrawals and drying up new money flows to the fund managers.
“We have very clear and strict investment rules which prevent pension-fund managers from placing funds with other fund-management companies,” Krufi said. Money managers other than pension funds, had about 4 billion cedis tied up at bailed-out lenders, savings and loans, micro-finance and micro-credit companies. The state pension fund has no investments locked up with any money managers or any of the collapsed banks, the Social Security and National Insurance Trust said.