Top officials who cleaned up and rebuilt Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security have resigned, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Director General Meshal Al Othman and three of his deputies, including Raed Al Nisf, were asked to resign from the fund, the people said, asking not to be identified before the official announcement. Finance ministry and fund officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The roughly $137 billion pension fund, which owns a quarter of US private equity firm Stone Point Capital LLC, recorded 20.9 per cent growth in assets in the last fiscal year.
The officials resigned from the fund under pressure from Kuwait’s political opposition, one of the people said. Opposition politicians have been calling for the government to remove any officials from state bodies deemed to be associated with the former leadership, regardless of performance or merit.
The fund performed so well that the former parliament approved a law to distribute a one-time special dividend of $10,000 to every Kuwaiti retiree earlier this year.
A new management team, which included the officials that resigned, was brought in in 2017 to overhaul the state-owned institution.
PIFSS, as the fund is known, also owns 25 per cent of Oak Hill Advisors and 10 per cent of TowerBrook Capital Partners LP.
