New Zealand Super Fund, Auckland, acquired a 4.99% stake in Euroclear Group, a global provider of financial markets infrastructure, for an undisclosed sum, according to a statement on Monday.
The transaction completed on Sept. 1, an NZ Super spokesman said. He declined to provide the purchase price. A recent valuation of the Brussels-based company was not available.
NZ Super has NZ$63 billion ($37.7 billion) in assets and allocates 5% of its portfolio to private equity.
The acquisition makes the sovereign wealth fund the fifth-largest shareholder of Euroclear, behind parent company Sicovam Holding, which owns 15.89% of the company, and other government-owned funds such as Belgian SWF Société Fédérale de Participations et d'Investissement (12.92%), French state investment arm Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (10.91%), and Kuri Atyak Investment Ltd (7.25%), a subsidiary of Chinese SWF, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, according to Euroclear's website.
Euroclear provides post-trade services including transaction settlement, asset servicing and collateral management. It has €36 trillion of assets under custody and handles more than 295 million transactions each year.
