[RFP] Korea Post seeks single offshore commingled hedge fund houses

Korea Post’s insurance unit on May 12 announced a plan to select global fund managers running single offshore commingled hedge funds by July, and will receive proposals by 5 pm, May 26 (local time).

The mandates will exclude fund of hedge funds and structured products.

Selected hedge fund managers are required to employ the following strategies:

(1) Equity long/short, (2) event driven, (3) credit relative value (credit long/short, fixed income arbitrage, structured credit and CB arbitrage, (4) discretionary global macro, or (5) multi-strategy (adopting more than three strategies mentioned above)

It did not disclose how much it will commit to those funds.

The qualified firm must have at least $1 billion in hedge fund assets under management at end-March, 2017. Also, the proposed offshore hedge fund must have a minimum $300 million with at least five years of track records.

They are required to meet quarterly redemption requests, while allowed to use a soft or hard lock-up for less than one year.

Korea Investment Management Co. Ltd., which manages onshore funds for Korea Post’s global hedge fund investments, may re-designate the applicant fund’s strategy, if it is deemed inappropriate, according to the request for proposal (RFP).

The RFP was issued shortly after the state-run agency’s insurance arm posted notifications of plans to invest in multi-strategy funds of hedge funds, as well as multi-strategy private equity FoF managers.