Management of the Strategic Reserve (FOI)

Request

A

Please could you provide details of the Investment Management firms that manage assets on behalf of the various Jersey Government long term and strategic reserves,

B

The value of each mandate

C

The type of investment strategies being pursued.

The reason for my request is to establish what exposure, if any, the Government of Jersey currently has to Private Equity and Venture Capital Investments.

Response

A to C

Details of the Investment Management firms that manage assets on behalf of the States of Jersey’s long term and strategic reserves have been detailed in the table below. 

Investment Management

This includes the total value of each asset pool (as at 31 October 2020) and summarises the Investment Managers managing mandates within each pool.

The ‘asset class’ column summarises the type of investment strategies being pursued; further details can be found in the Investment Strategy document published online, at the following link:

Investment Strategies (October 2019)

We do not disclose allocations to individual mangers, such disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of a person (including the scheduled public authority holding the information) and therefore Article 33 (Commercial interests) of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

Article applied

Article 33 Commercial interests

Information is qualified exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes a trade secret; or 

(b) its disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of a person (including the scheduled public authority holding the information). 

Prejudice / public interest test 

Article 33 (b) is a prejudice-based exemption. That means that in order to engage this exemption there must be a likelihood that disclosure would cause prejudice to the interest that the exemption protects. In addition, this is a qualified exemption and consideration must be given to the public interest in maintaining the exemption. 

It is acknowledged that there could be public interest from a transparency perspective in providing a more detailed breakdown of how much money is invested with each individual investment manager. However, balanced against this is the interest of the investment manager and the potential impact that disclosure of this information might prejudice their commercial interests and their ability to manage their portfolios which are a combination of investments from a significant number of third-party investors. On balance we have concluded that the impact on the individual investment managers’ commercial interests is greater than the public interest of releasing the individual amounts.