PSERS removing contracts for 150 investments

PSERS, a pension fund with about $50 billion in total assets, decided to remove investment contracts for alternative investments that were posted to the public website, available through the state treasurer’s site, prior to 2012, according to Evelyn Tatkovski, a spokesperson for PSERS, sister website peHUB reported.

In 2012, the pension fund changed its policy to stop posting alternative investment contracts containing terms to the public site, and only posting so-called subscription agreements. At the time, the system did not pull all the alternative investment contracts left on the site that were older than 2012.

Twelve of those contracts (plus contracts for two parallel funds) were publicized by financial blog Naked Capitalism. In the wake of the disclosure, the pension decided to make a mass removal of the alternative investment contracts still available on the public site.

The contracts that will be removed will be replaced with subscription agreements, which are “the documents by which PSERS and other investors commit money to be invested and include questionnaires for information about each investor,” Tatkovski said.

It was still not clear if the documents included in Naked Capitalism’s disclosure should be considered public records since they have been widely disseminated, one of the factors used in determining if a record can be re-sealed after going public.

A state open records official said dissemination, as well as how the documents were made public and the types of documents, are all considered when determining when a closed record can be transformed into an open record.

Chris Witkowsky is editor of peHUB.