The New Zealand Superannuation Fund today announced that Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo & Co (GMO) has been awarded a global multi-strategy mandate.

This is the second global multi-strategy mandate awarded by the Fund following the appointment of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) last month.

Under the mandate GMO will employ a number of different active management strategies incorporating equities, fixed income, currency markets and relative value between those markets to generate alpha. The alpha generated by this strategy will be overlaid on a market exposure for which the benchmark is the MSCI World Equity Index.

Headquartered in Boston, GMO is a privately-held investment management firm with around US$100 billion under management. It is the fourth mandate awarded to GMO since the Fund began investing in September 2003. In June 2004 they were appointed to manage a small cap EAFE equities mandate, followed by a large cap global growth equities mandate in February 2005, and a New Zealand timber mandate in October 2005.
The appointment of GMO brings the total number of external investment mandates to 34. The value of the Fund at 30 April 2006 was $9.9 billion.

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For more information please contact:

Paul Costello, CEO, New Zealand Superannuation Fund, + 64 9 300 6980 Paul Chadwick, Executive Director, GMO, + 612 8274 9902

Notes to Editors:

About GMO:

For further information on GMO, visit www.gmo.com