EPFO fund managers to get three months extension

Provident fund body EPFO's existing four fund managers ICICI Pru, HSBC, Reliance Capital and SBI will get three months extension to manage the Rs 3 lakh crore retirement fund till June 30.

Although the term of the existing four fund manager's term ends on March 31, they will be asked to continue for three more months as the EPFO has not been able to complete the process of appointing new asset management companies (AMCs).

"The existing fund mangers would continue to manage EPFO's Rs 3 lakh crore corpus till June 30 because of delay in appointment of new AMCs for a term of three years beginning April 1," a source said.

The matter, he said, would be placed before the EPFO trustees on March 30 for final decision.

The Central Board of Trustees (CBT), which is headed by the Labour Minister, is the apex decision making body of the EPFO.

"Since there is no possibility of new fund managers taking over from April 1, the proposal to give three months extension to existing AMCs is likely to be approved by the CBT," he added.

EPFO had started the process of appointing the new fund managers last year after it engaged credit rating agency Crisil for appointment and to later monitoring the performance of new fund managers.

As many as 11 AMCs have evinced interest to manage the EPFO huge corpus which receives incremental deposits of about Rs 30,000 crore every year.

Besides existing AMCs managing EPFO corpus, seven new firms, including Kotak Securities, Securities Trading Corporation of India, UTI Securities and ICICI Securities have expressed interest to manage the retirement fund.

In order to avoid any controversy amidst the recent outbreak of scams, EPFO had sent its tender document to Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) for vetting.

The source said that as the CVC has not yet approved the EPFO's tender document, it would not be possible to move ahead with the proposal and appoint fund managers before the end of current fiscal.