Public Investment Fund fills key positions

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) said on Thursday it had filled key posts as part of plans to expand investment capacity and help reduce the Kingdom’s dependence on oil income.
Under economic reform plans announced early this year, the government has said it aims eventually to expand the PIF, founded in 1971 to finance development projects in the country, from $160 billion to about $2 trillion and increase investments abroad.
The PIF did not name the people it had appointed, but LinkedIn profiles showed at least five financial professionals had begun working at the sovereign wealth fund in the last several weeks.
In a statement Thursday, the fund said the appointments would help it “build a world-class investment portfolio, domestically and internationally, positioning it among the leading sovereign wealth funds globally.”
The PIF owns tens of billions of dollars’ worth of stakes in top Saudi companies. In a statement this week, the sovereign wealth fund said it had no plan to sell stakes in local companies.
In its expanded role, it is to invest more actively abroad in order to boost the government’s returns on its financial reserves and help to obtain business and technology that can diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil.
In June, the PIF departed from Saudi Arabia’s traditional strategy of investments abroad and took a step into the tech world by purchasing a $3.5 billion stake in US transport firm Uber.
Last month, it said it might invest up to $45 billion over the next five years in a technology investment fund that it would establish with Japan’s SoftBank Group. 
The new fund could grow as large as $100 billion, making it one of the world’s biggest private equity investors, the partners said.

Source: Arab News