Qatar fund to become Gulf Investment Fund – Qatar Investment Fund intends to change its investment policy from a largely Qatar-focused investment strategy to a broader Gulf Cooperation Council (“GCC”) investment strategy. Currently, the investment policy enables it to invest up to 15% in GCC countries (namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Oman and Bahrain) other than Qatar. The proposed change in investment policy will remove the 15% limit and enable it to increase its investment allocation to other GCC countries and provide the Investment Adviser with a wider investment universe and more flexibility to identify attractive opportunities in the GCC region.
Alongside this, the Board has resolved to put forward a number of proposals including:
- making a tender offer for up to 10% of the issued share capital;
- cancelling the discontinuation vote currently scheduled for the 2018 annual general meeting and replacing it with a continuation vote for the 2021 annual general meeting and every three years thereafter;
- making a tender offer to shareholders for up to 100% of the share capital in 2020, subject to shareholder approval to be sought in 2020; and
- proposing to change the name of the company to Gulf Investment Fund PLC.
All of these changes will be subject to the approval of the shareholders at an Extraordinary General Meeting, other than the tender offer in 2020 which will be subject to shareholder approval in 2020.
Whilst it is not intended that the Board will adopt a formal benchmark by which to measure the performance and portfolio composition/allocation, the Board will monitor the performance of the S&P GCC Composite Index by way of reference only. They say that the S&P GCC Composite Index has 298 constituents, and the index weighting by country is Saudi Arabia (56.6%), United Arab Emirates (16.5%), Qatar (11.8%), Kuwait (10.2%), Bahrain (2.6%) and Oman (2.3%).
A few new restrictions will apply:
- no single investment position in a S&P GCC Composite Index constituent may, exceed the greater of: (i) 15% of the NAV of the Company; or (ii) 125% of the constituent company’s index capitalisation divided by the index capitalisation of the S&P GCC Composite Index, as calculated by Bloomberg;
- no single investment position in a company which is not a S&P GCC Composite Index constituent may exceed 15% of the NAV of the Company; and
- no holding may exceed 5% of the outstanding shares in any one company
QIF : Qatar fund to become Gulf Investment Fund