Poles May Have Withdrawn Record Amount From Mutual Funds

Poles may have pulled a record 10 billion zloty ($4.1 billion) from local mutual funds in January because of turmoil on stock markets, the chief of the biggest Polish fund said, cited by Bloomberg.

``I know the scale of money withdrawals in my fund and I would estimate the net outflow in the industry, or the difference between redemptions and new investments, to be 10 billion zloty this month,'' Zbigniew Jagiello, head of Pioneer Pekao TFI SA, said in an interview with TVN CNBC Biznes today.

The total assets of the mutual funds in Poland probably shrank to between 110 billion zloty and 120 billion zloty in January, Jagiello said. They had about 134 billion zloty of assets at the end of last year, according to estimates by the Warsaw-based Chamber of Fund and Asset Managers.

The benchmark WIG20 Index has plummeted 16 percent this month, losing more than a quarter of its value since reaching a record in October. Concern the U.S. may slip into a recession, worsening a global economic slowdown, may be weighing on stock markets.

Pioneer Pekao TFI, an investment unit of UniCredit SpA's Bank Pekao SA, had 28.7 billion zloty of assets under management at the end of December, or 21 percent of the market.