(Bloomberg) -- Scandal-hit pension fund Alecta is getting closer to finding a new chairman of the board after bungling appointments for the role earlier this year.
Alecta has asked Sweden’s financial watchdog to perform a management suitability assessment, nine months after Carina Akerstrom resigned from her position as chair, according to written documents to the Financial Supervisory Authority that were seen by Bloomberg News.
A spokesperson for Alecta confirmed the fund had applied for a suitability test for a new chairman but declined to comment on the person’s identity. Current interim chairman Jan-Olof Jacke declined to comment on the documents.
The application has been kept confidential, including the identity of the proposed appointee, in part because “it can be assumed that Alecta will be damaged if the information is made public,” the pension group said in the documents.
In March, Akerstrom resigned a little over a week after being appointed as chair of Alecta, which manages $121 billion of retirement savings for a quarter of the country’s population. It was an embarrassing climb down that followed a report in newspaper Dagens Industri about a potential conflict of interest related to the fund’s holding in Heimstaden Bostad AB.
Prior to that, the fund was forced to retract its previous nominee — former Danish central bank Governor Lars Rohde in late January – over a separate conflict of interest.
Alecta had presented Rohde as a successor to Ingrid Bonde, who stepped down in the fall of 2023 after facing criticism over the fund’s more than $3 billion of losses and writedowns connected to defunct US niche banks and its stake in Heimstaden. Last year also saw Alecta let go of a number of top executives and board members.
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