Raymond Frenken

While Canadian and Australian pension funds are set to increase their investments in infrastructure assets in the years ahead, their European counterparts are slow to recognize the benefits of this asset class, potentially missing out on additional returns they could achieve for their clients.

Foord Asset Management, a firm with South African roots and a Luxembourg presence since 2013, is expanding its global reach by offering long-term investors in Australia a new feeder fund for its Foord Global Equity Fund registered in the Grand Duchy.

The new Foord Global Equity Australian Feeder Fund invests exclusively in the Foord Sicav- Foord Global Equity Fund (Luxembourg). The fund held assets worth 472 million dollars at the end of 2021, with holdings in for example Alphabet, Tencent, JD.com, Freeport-McMoran and Alibaba. 

A new EU law from 2025 will require companies in Europe to accept a future in which their reporting data on sustainability and their ESG impact will be just as important as data on their financial performance. Non-EU companies also will be subject to these requirements. “The landscape is going to change because preparers are going to offer reliable data,” said Patrick de Cambourg, chair of the EU taskforce on sustainability reporting standards.

The increasingly stringent EU regime for green finance was discussed in Paris on Wednesday at the World Pensions Council conference. Pension fund APG believes that the EU approach has introduced “commercial incentives to go dark green”, exposing the industry to greenwashing. “I am not convinced that all the rules and regulations get the industry to do the right thing,” said Gert Dijkstra, senior managing director at APG.

Germany has unexpectedly reported its first trade deficit since 1991. The reversal of the trade balance in Europe’s largest economy shows how difficult it is for German companies to handle rising costs of oil and gas. Economists at ABN Amro and Nomura meanwhile expect Europe will enter into a recession.

In Luxembourg’s financial sector, ‘the new Ucits’ is an informal but widely recognised label that stands for innovation and promising change. It refers to the success of its 1980s investment legislation that offered European passports to Ucits investments funds, sparking a multi-decade boom in the financial sector, turning Luxembourg into Europe’s leading hub for investment funds and replacing the steel industry as the country’s main economic driver.

Private Equity in the coming years is set to attract a wider range of investors, in particular those who are considered High Net Worth Individuals. But the expansion of what still largely is seen as a private club does not come without risk, a conference organised by the Luxembourg Private Equity Association has heard.

Luxembourg’s post-Brexit boom in financial sector relocations and foreign direct investment is over, according to an EY study on the Grand Duchy’s attractiveness that was released on Tuesday.

In an interview with Investment Officer, Nobel Economics Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, speaks about making decisions. His theory, which also holds value for the financial sector, has demonstrated that our decisions are often flawed, biassed and inaccurate. “If people made better decisions, the world would be a better place.”

Luxembourg has witnessed that European integration still has its limits, even when war rages on Europe’s doorstep.

As world markets digested the Federal Reserve’s rate hike and the ECB’s emergency meeting, finance ministers of the 19 eurozone countries met at the EU conference centre on the Kirchberg plateau in Luxembourg and passed on an opportunity to further integrate financial services. Plans to complete Banking Union, first agreed in 2013, are now sent back to the drawing board.