News Release from the Management Board of Public Service Pension Fund, Ministry of Civil ServicePublic Service Pension Fund is starting its first foreign discretionary operationThe Public Service Pension Fund（PSPF）, the official of the Management Board of Public Service Pension Fund ( MBPSPF ) said on Sunday, is going to announce its first application process for overseas discretionary project on 11 August 2003. The amount for this outsourcing is US$500 million. Five international asset management firms and one global custody bank will be selected to undertake the outsourcing from PSPF before the end of this year, 2003. All candidates have to be qualified with the application requirements set by MBPSPF and the deadline for submitting response to the RFP and other application documents to MBPSPF is 5 p.m. on 22 September 2003.The main application requirements for asset managers are as follows, 1. Institutional assets under management should reach US$ 25 billion or more and, additionally for financial institutions, being the top 1000 banks around the world in terms of assets being managed as of 31March 2003. 2. To provide client service team with at least three persons in Taipei, Taiwan. 3. To outperform benchmark mentioned below in last two years, from 1 April 2001 to 31March 2003. And main application criteria for global custody bank are as follows, 1. A branch office with client service team in Taiwan is required. 2. Assets under custody should reach US$ 500 billion as at 31December, 2002. For the assets under custody below US$ 500 billion, but above US$ 3 billion should alliance with a global custodian which assets under custody reach US$ 500 billion. 3. The credit rating for long-term debt in the past one year (from July 2002 to July 2003) must reach the minimum rating of twA+ by Taiwan Ratings, or A- by Standard & Poor’s Corporation, or A3 by Moody’s Investors Service, or A- by Fitch IBCA LTD.The US$500 million outsourcing looks for five asset management firms and US$100 million for each firm, including two types of mandate, of which US$300 million will be for international balance mandates, whereas US$200 million will be for international index equity mandates. The percentage of central weight for international balance mandate is 60% in stock and 40% in bond, whereas the benchmark for stock is the MSCI World Index -- Developed Countries and that for bond is the JP Morgan Government Bond Index -- Global. And benchmark for international index equity mandate is also the MSCI World Index -- Developed Countries. PSPF is also searching for a qualified global custody bank to cope with the discretionary assets managed by these global external asset managers hired by PSPF. The fund size of PSPF accumulated to NT$ 220 billion since the inception, eight years ago, in 1995 and is getting bigger day by day. Under the circumstances that the domestic capital market is small, trading instruments are few, and the investment objectives are limited, investment solely in the domestic market will make it hard to avoid the risk arising from investment in a single region even with attempt to disperse the risks by way of diversifying the investment objectives. If the investment markets are diversified, the risks will be effectively dispersed. Following this idea, so MBPSPF implement the policy, foreign outsourcing from part of PSPF, made by Examination Yuan and the Executive Yuan, Republic of China, and made its best efforts to promote and revised its first foreign discretionary project since June in 2002. And from the full support of the Central Bank of China, the CBC had approved, without using cross currency swap, the amount of US$ 500 million for this foreign outsourcing by PSPF. The discretionary management for outsourcing part of PSPF to external managers is not only the policy approved by the Examination Yuan and the Executive Yuan but also an inevitable path in the fact of the internationalization and globalization of capital markets in Taiwan and in order to connect the global community. Over the recent one year, with deliberate planning, MBPSPF have held 14 meetings on the related subjects, to which experts, scholars, representatives of government agencies, foreign and domestic asset management companies, global custodian banks were invited to broadly contribute their ideas and opinions in order to build up the related internal guidance and documents for this project, ex. the RFP and sample contract. All drafts related to the documents about this outsourcing had set up through very careful process and passed by the Supervisory Board and Management Board of PSPF at the end of July 2003. MBPSPF will release the announcements to public and start to take the submission from applicants on 11 August and finish the project before the end of 2003. At that moment of finishing the project, PSPF will become the first government fund to launch foreign outsourcing plan as it did for domestic outsourcing plan in 2001 and build up a milestone for foreign outsourcing operations among the government funds in Taiwan.