Oyak Bank: hot potato and hot property
Marriages of convenience to decline?
To most fund managers, comparing a pension fund with a conglomerate would seem absurd. Yet Serif Coskun Ulusoy, president and CEO of Oyak (Ordu Yardimlasma Kurumu/Armed Forces Pension Fund), freely compares the pension fund’s performance with those of the two largest conglomerates in Turkey, Koc and Sabanci Holding. The reason is simple: more than half of the fund’s assets lie in shares in over 60 Turkish companies. What is more, almost all of the companies involved are majority owned by Oyak.
It might be an unusual model for generating returns but it has served Oyak well so far. It is Turkey’s largest private pension fund, with more than 277,000 members, and the only one of the supplementary funds established in 1961 that still exists. The fund has been able to deliver an annual...
