Croatian Pension and Investment Funds Kick off Intervention Pool

The pool, called Fund for Stability, is to help investment funds in cases when they find themselves unable to sell their financial assets and pay to shareholders, InterCapital Asset Management (ICAM) in a statement. It received an approval by the country’s financial watchdog HANFA on Thursday. 

The fund will operate for five years. The initial investors in it, as announced earlier this week are, are the four Croatian managers of mandatory pension funds and the four largest open-end investment funds. They include mandatory pension fund managers AZ, Erste Plavi, PBZ - CO and Raiffeisen, and open-end fund managers ZB Invest, PBZ Invest, Erste Invest, and Raiffeisen Invest.

The participants have already contributed a total of 50 million kuna ($9.4 million/7.0 million euro) into the pool and will pay a further 100 million kuna when asked to do so by the fund manager, the statement said.

In Croatia, the recent global financial crisis has manifested itself mostly by a huge drop in the price of assets of open-end investment funds and an outflow of money from them, high volatility of share prices, almost complete absence of initial public offerings and panic sell-offs of shares mirroring plunges of equity indices abroad.

(1 euro = 7.1621 Croatian kuna)