At a hastily assembled press conference late Friday afternoon in Montreal, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec tried to dismiss rumours about possible liquidity issues.
“The Caisse has no liquidity problems,” said Fernand Perreault, executive vice-president, real estate, who is also the interim president and chief executive until Richard Guay returns from his medical leave. “The Caisse currently has about $20 billion of liquidity, an amount that corresponds, for all practical purposes, to its historic level.”
He added that the pension fund manager has enough liquidity to meet all its obligations and the amount it receives from depositors on an ongoing basis currently exceeds withdrawals. This positive flow is expected to continue for several more years.
And Pierre Brunet, the chairman of the Caisse, also resisted calls to report interim results.
“The Caisse is currently under considerable pressure to deviate from its governance rules and to publish an interim report for the current year,” he said. “A significant portion of the Caisse’s investments, such as its real estate and private equity holdings are subject to year-end valuation by independent committees, in a highly regulated process that ensures the integrity thereof. To publish interim data would therefore mean publishing incomplete, unaudited figures.”
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Regardless of the results the fund reports at the end of the year, Brunet said they will be placed in an overall context in which all fund managers in Canada and around the world will have to meet the same challenges.
“That being said,” he explained, “at this time we have no reason to draw conclusions about the performance that the Caisse will record in 2008 in relation to its peers, which face exactly the same challenges as it.”
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