South Korea’s Military Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) is seeking bids for a 90 billion won (US$65.37 million) domestic credit mandate, the military insurance fund’s first tender in almost a year.
MMAA will hire three asset managers for the mandate. The investment will be structured as a blind fund that will have to allocate at least 70% of assets to secondary and junior debt, including convertible bonds and exchangeable bonds, the group says in a request for proposal on August 8.
The fund is expected to be formed within six months after the winning bidders are selected.
Asset management firms bidding on the tender should not have been subject to warnings of regulatory violations by financial regulators over the past five years, and must have their main offices in Korea.
Applications are open until August 21 and the winning firms are expected to be hired by the end of October.
MMAA last outsourced an investment in September 2023, when it sought bids for a foreign equity mandate. The value of that tender was not disclosed. Like most Korean asset owners, it didn’t announce the winning bidders publicly.
The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute estimates that MMAA has around $11.7 billion of assets under management. The group does not publish its asset data publicly.