Dorset County Pension Fund has awarded a £40m (€50m) infrastructure investment mandate to private equity and infrastructure specialist manager Hermes Infrastructure.

The money will be invested in Hermes Infrastructure’s pooled fund, which is due to close in April 2015, a spokeswoman confirmed.  

The fund has already raised £850m.

Hermes’s spokeswoman said the manager was offering all Local Government Pension Schemes (LGPS) the opportunity to aggregate their commitments to the pooled fund, to get the benefit of a discount of up to 50% on the total fee, depending on the final size of the aggregated commitments.  

The discount is triggered at the £50m commitment level, which has already been reached, meaning any additional LGPS investor will immediately benefit. 

So far, the Dorset pension fund and two other LGPSs have committed to invest in the fund, the spokeswoman said.

“We’re hopeful we’ll get some more LGPSs before the fund closes in April 2015,” she said.

Yesterday, IFM Investments announced that Dorset County Pension Fund awarded it a £40m infrastructure mandate.

The Dorset fund, the Avon Pension Fund and the City and County of Swansea Pension Fund had put out a joint tender notice earlier in the year, looking for infrastructure managers.