Pension funds to make their investments public

The investments of pension funds, which manage over one billion euros in assets and have a potential to become the biggest stock exchange investors over the next few years, will become public information twice a year, once the Private Pension System Supervisory Commission (CSSPP) has approved a set of modifications brought to the reporting and transparency norms.

The private pensions regulator wants to significantly increase the transparency of the funds and force managers of mandatory and voluntary pension funds to publish the detailed structure of the funds’ investments on December 31st and June 30th.
The Commission’s measure comes at a time when transparency legislation was rather lenient, leaving it to managers to decide what information they make public. So the managers preferred not to disclose the detailed structure of the funds’ portfolios, with some of them even refusing to provide the information to contributors, on demand, citing confidentiality of the fund’s assets. Every salaried employee must contribute 2.5% of their gross salary to a private pension fund, with the contribution to rise to 3% as of March 2011.