CIBC today announced that it will hold special meetings to enable unitholders of certain CIBC 5-Year Protected Mutual Funds to vote on proposed mergers of the funds into certain funds in the CIBC Mutual Funds family.
Specifically, unitholders of each fund will be asked to approve all matters relating to its proposed merger with its corresponding continuing fund as follows:
- Merging CIBC Canadian Fixed Income Index Fund (formerly, 5-Year Protected Canadian Bond Index Fund) into CIBC Canadian Bond Index Fund;
- Merging CIBC Canadian Equity Index Fund (formerly, 5-Year Protected Canadian Index Fund) into CIBC Canadian Index Fund;
- Merging CIBC U.S. Index Fund (formerly, 5-Year Protected U.S. Index Fund) into CIBC U.S. Equity Index Fund; and
- Merging CIBC International Equity Index Fund (formerly, 5-Year Protected International Index Fund) into CIBC International Index RRSP Fund.
In order to facilitate the proposed merger of CIBC U.S. Index Fund into CIBC U.S. Equity Index Fund, unitholders of CIBC U.S. Index Fund will also be asked to approve, as part of the merger, the change of investment objective of CIBC U.S. Index Fund so that the fund will track its return to the performance of the Wilshire 5000 Index, instead of the S&P 500 Total Return Index.
The special meetings are scheduled for Thursday, April 14, 2005. Subject to receipt of regulatory and unitholder approvals, the proposed mergers will occur on or about April 28, 2005, and the change of investment objective of CIBC U.S. Index Fund will occur approximately five business days prior to the proposed merger of the fund.
On a related note, effective January 1, 2005, CIBC will be reducing the maximum management fee payable per year (exclusive of GST), expressed as an annual percentage of net asset value, for each of the continuing funds to 1.00%, a portion of which may be waived.
In recent years, the actual management fee charged for each continuing fund has been less than 1.00%.