In his report to the board of trustees last Friday, Fund Administrator Richard S. Villagomez said, “We determined them to be non-responsive.”
He asked the board if they could issue a regular RFP for investment consultant and actuarial services and inform the four proposers for consultant that their proposals were non responsive.
Villagomez also told the board that they were looking at placing an announcement in the “Pension & Investments Magazine” at a one-shot deal worth $5,000.
He also said that should P.L. 17-51 be repealed, there’s a possibility that the Fund would be able to contract again with their former service providers.
In an interview, Fund Board Chairman Sixto K. Igisomar was asked the basis or bases for not accepting the proposals, he said, “They didn’t satisfy what we are looking for.”
He explained that some proposers failed to respond to the criteria on compliance with CNMI law.
He said that some responded with, “It depends.”
He also said they were in the assumption that if P.L. 17-51 their former service providers would come back.
He also said, “Right now, we are already in a mess. We are doing the best we can to steer the boat in the right direction. Right now we are in the middle of the storm.”
P.L. 6-17 provides that the Fund needs to be guided by a consultant with minimum of $200 million under its advisement.
With P.L. 17-51, the Fund was left to operate on its own and was forced to abandon its investment strategy pegged on BlackRock money manager; instead, it adopted a Modified GlidePath 2013, an ultra-conservative approach that liquidated all its assets and proceeded to depositing its money on Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service network.
As of last week, the Fund had already moved $55 million of $261 million to CDARS and may need to move approximately $15 million every week to hundreds of financial institutions with a maximum deposit of $250,000 as insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
