October 2018

Kazakhstan: Pension plans darken a grim picture

The government appears eager to shed an onerous and unrewarding responsibility: managing its citizens’ pensions. Authorities in Kazakhstan are set once again to tinker with how pension funds are managed. And if social media and news website comment boards are any indication, people are livid. Since 2013, pension contributions have been held in an entity called the Single Accumulated Savings Fund, or ENPF in its Russian initials. The fund comprises 10 million accounts worth a total of 9 trillion tenge ($25...

December 2017

Kazakhstan may merge oil, pension funds: president

Kazakhstan may merge its $23 billion state pension fund with the $57 billion oil fund in order to streamline their management, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said on Monday. The oil-rich Central Asian nation hires foreigners to manage most of its oil fund assets and the addition of the pension fund could create more opportunities to expand. “Norway has good experience, they have merged their pension fund with their national (oil) fund, similar to the one we have,” Nazarbayev said on state television. Read...

June 2017

Pension Fund Problems in Kazakhstan

In April 2013, Kazakhstan’s parliament passed a bill creating a single pension fund (ENPF), with the objective of nationalizing the pension funds that were previously held at banks and other financial institutions. At the time, the objective was to safeguard pension assets, given the troubled period that banks in Kazakhstan had just experienced after the global financial crisis of 2007. The merger of the private pension funds proved to be a challenging feat, as the most prominent banks either held...