Institutional

Charities

The site for Pension Investors is for individuals who have a BlackRock pension or for individuals who invest in BlackRock funds through their employer’s pension.

The institutional site is for pension schemes, Consultants or other professional investors.

The charities content is only available to Pensions that meet that definition of a professional investor which is defined in the regulations as follows:

In relation to MiFID or equivalent third country business a large undertaking meeting two of the following size requirements on a company basis:

(a)  balance sheet total of EUR 20,000,000; (b)  net turnover of EUR 40,000,000; (c)  own funds of EUR 2,000,000;

If your charity does not meet this definition please do not progress any further and please select the section of the website for individual investors.

An individual investor, also known as a retail client, is a client organisation or individual who cannot meet both (i) one or more of the professional client criteria laid down in Annex II to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Directive 2004/39/EC), and (ii) one or more of the qualified investor criteria set out in Article 2 of the Prospectus Directive (Directive 2003/71/EC).

On this website, Intermediaries are investors that qualify as both a Professional Client and a Qualified Investor.

In summary a person who can both be classified as a professional client under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and a qualified investor in accordance with the Prospectus Directive will generally need to meet one or more of the following requirements:

(1) An entity required to be authorised or regulated to operate in the financial markets. The following list includes all authorised entities carrying out the characteristic activities of the entities mentioned, whether authorised by an EEA State or a third country and whether or not authorised by reference to a directive:

(a) a credit institution;

(b) an investment firm;

(c) any other authorised or regulated financial institution;

(d) an insurance company;

(e) a collective investment scheme or the management company of such a scheme;

(f) a pension fund or the management company of a pension fund;

(g) a commodity or commodity derivatives dealer;

(h) a local

(i) any other institutional investor;

(2) a large undertaking that meets two of the following tests: (i) a balance sheet total of EUR 43,000,000; (ii) an annual net turnover of EUR 50,000,000; (iii) an average number of employees during the year of 250

(3) a national or regional government, a public body that manages public debt, a central bank, an international or supranational institution (such as the World Bank, the IMF, the ECB, the EIB) or another similar international organisation.

(4) a natural person resident in an EEA State that permits the authorisation of natural persons as qualified investors, who expressly asks to be treated as a professional client and a qualified investor and who meets at least two of the following criteria: (i) he/she has carried out transactions on securities markets at an average frequency of, at least, 10 per quarter over the previous four quarters before the application, (ii) the size of his/her financial instrument portfolio, defined as including cash deposits and financial instruments exceeds EUR 500.000, (iii) he/she works or has worked for at least one year in the financial sector in a professional position which requires knowledge of securities investment.

Please note that the above summary is provided for information purposes only. If you are uncertain as to whether you can both be classified as a professional client under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and classed as a qualified investor under the Prospectus Directive then you should seek independent advice.

Please read this page before proceeding, as it explains certain restrictions imposed by law on the distribution of this information and the countries in which our funds are authorised for sale. It is your responsibility to be aware of and to observe all applicable laws and regulations of any relevant jurisdiction.

Please note that you are required to read and accept the terms of our Privacy Policy before you are able to access our websites.

Once you have confirmed that you agree to the legal information in this document, and the Privacy Policy – by indicating your consent above – we will place a cookie on your computer to recognise you and prevent this page reappearing should you access this site, or other BlackRock sites, on future occasions.  The cookie will expire after six months, or sooner should there be a material change to this important information.

By confirming that you have read this important information, you also:

(i) Agree that such information will apply to any subsequent access to the Individual investors (or Institutions / Intermediaries) section of this website by you, and that all such subsequent access will be subject to the disclaimers, risk warnings and other information set out herein; and

(ii) Warrant that no other person will access the Individual investors section of this website from the same computer and logon as you are currently using.

The BlackRock authorised unit trusts are funds authorised under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and are generally available for investment by the public in the UK.

The offshore funds described in the following pages are administered and managed by companies within the BlackRock Group and can be marketed in certain jurisdictions only. It is your responsibility to be aware of the applicable laws and regulations of your country of residence. Further information is available in the Prospectus or other constitutional document for each fund. Please note that only some of the offshore funds seek distributor status in the UK.

The BlackRock Pensions Funds are available through the products of BlackRock Life Limited (authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority). They are available only to trustees and members of pension schemes registered under Part IV of the Finance Act 2004 via an insurance policy which would be issued either by BlackRock Life Limited, or by another insurer of such business.

This does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell shares in any of the funds referred to on this site, by anyone in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or distribution would be unlawful or in which the person making such offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so or to anyone to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation.

Specifically, the funds described are not available for distribution to or investment by US investors. The units/shares will not be registered under the US Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act) and, except in a transaction which does not violate the Securities Act or any other applicable US securities laws (including without limitation any applicable law of any of the States of the USA) may not be directly or indirectly offered or sold in the USA or any of its territories or possessions or areas subject to its jurisdiction or to or for the benefit of a US Person.

The funds described have not been, nor will they be, qualified for distribution to the public in Canada as no prospectus for these funds has been filed with any securities commission or regulatory authority in Canada or any province or territory thereof. This website is not, and under no circumstances is to be construed, as an advertisement or any other step in furtherance of a public offering of shares in Canada. No person resident in Canada for the purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada) may purchase or accept a transfer of shares in the funds described unless he or she is eligible to do so under applicable Canadian or provincial laws.

Applications to invest in any fund referred to on this site, must only be made on the basis of the offer document relating to the specific investment (e.g. prospectus, simplified prospectus, key investor information document or other applicable terms and conditions).

As a result of money laundering regulations, additional documentation for identification purposes may be required when you make your investment. Details are contained in the relevant Prospectus or other constitutional document.

If you are unsure about the meaning of any information provided please consult your financial or other professional adviser.

The information contained on this site is published in good faith but no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited or by any person as to its accuracy or completeness and it should not be relied on as such. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability, save for any liability that BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited may have under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (or the name of any replacement legislation if the legislation permits such a statement to be made), for any loss or damage arising out of the use or reliance on the information provided including without limitation, any loss of profit or any other damage, direct or consequential. No information on this site constitutes investment, tax, legal or any other advice.

Where a claim is brought against BlackRock by a third party in relation to your use of this website, you hereby agree to fully reimburse BlackRock for all losses, costs, actions, proceedings, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable legal costs and expenses), or liabilities, whatsoever suffered or incurred directly by BlackRock as a consequence of improper use of this website.  Neither party should be liable to the other for any loss or damage which may be suffered by the other party due to any cause beyond the first party’s reasonable control including without limitation any power failure.

You acknowledge and agree that it is your responsibility to keep secure and confidential any passwords that we issue to you and your authorised employees and not to let such password(s) become public knowledge. If any password(s) become known by someone other than you and your authorised employees, you must change those particular password(s) immediately using the function available for this purpose on the Website.

You may leave the BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited website when you access certain links on this website. In so doing, you may be proceeding to the site of an organisation that is not regulated under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited has not examined any of these websites and does not assume any responsibility for the contents of such websites nor the services, products or items offered through such websites.

BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to, any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the services provided herein.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and are not guaranteed.

You may not get back the amount you invested.

Any favourable tax treatment of a product (including but not limited to ISAs) is subject to government legislation and as such may not be maintained.

The levels and bases of, and reliefs from, taxation changed in the last Budget and may change in the future.

Rates of exchange may cause the value of investments to go up or down.

Fluctuation may be particularly marked in the case of a higher volatility fund and the value of an investment may fall suddenly and substantially.

For your protection, telephone calls are usually recorded.

Please note that while some of the BlackRock funds are ring-fenced, others form part of a single company and are not. For BlackRock funds that do not have segregated liability status, in the event of a single BlackRock fund being unable to meet liabilities attributable to that BlackRock fund out of the assets attributable to it, the excess may be met out of the assets attributable to the other BlackRock funds within the same company. We refer you to the prospectus or other relevant terms and conditions of each BlackRock fund for further information in this regard.

The BlackRock unit trusts are managed by BlackRock Fund Managers Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and a member of the Investment Management Association) which is the unit trust management affiliate of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited.

The BlackRock ISA are managed by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority).

Companies within the BlackRock Group which do not carry out investment business in the UK are not subject to the provisions of the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Accordingly, investors entering into investment agreements with such companies will not have the protection afforded by that Act or the rules and regulations made under it, including the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of BlackRock as a whole or any part thereof, nor do they constitute investment or any other advice.

Any research found on these pages has been procured and may have been acted on by BlackRock for its own purposes.

www.fca.org.uk. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited is a company registered in England, No. 2020394. Registered Office: 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London EC2N 2DL. BlackRock is a trading name of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited. VAT No GB 888 4204 87. General enquiries about this website should be sent to EMEAwebmaster@blackrock.com. This email address should not be used for any enquiries relating to investments.

Important Information

© 2014 Morningstar. All Rights Reserved. The information, data, analyses, and opinions contained herein (1) include the proprietary information of Morningstar, (2) may not be copied or redistributed, (3) do not constitute investment advice offered by Morningstar, (4) are provided solely for informational purposes and therefore are not an offer to buy or sell a security, and (5) are not warranted to be correct, complete, or accurate. Morningstar shall not be responsible for any trading decisions, damages, or other losses resulting from, or related to, this information, data, analyses, or opinions or their use. The Morningstar Analyst Rating™ is subjective in nature and reflects Morningstar’s current expectations of future events/behaviour as they relate to a particular fund. Because such events/behaviour may turn out to be different than expected, Morningstar does not guarantee that a fund will perform in line with its Morningstar Analyst Rating. Likewise, the Morningstar Analyst Rating should not be seen as any sort of guarantee or assessment of the creditworthiness of a fund or of its underlying securities and should not be used as the sole basis for making any investment decision.

BlackRock recognizes the importance of protecting your personal and financial information when you visit our websites (each a “Website” and together “Websites”). This Policy is designed to help you understand the information collection practices on all Websites owned or operated by or on behalf of companies within the BlackRock group of companies, including (but not limited to) blackrock.com and ishares.com, together with their local variations (for example, blackrock.co.uk).

We are committed to:

(a)   protecting the personal information you provide to us;

Changes to this Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy is dated 24 May 2012.  BlackRock reserves the right to amend this Privacy Policy at any time without notice, by updating this posting, in which case the date of the Policy will be revised.  However, you will be asked to provide your consent to updated versions of this Policy in the event of a material change to the information contained within it.  In addition, you will be asked to reaffirm your consent to this Policy on a six monthly basis.  The current version of this Policy can be accessed from the link on www.blackrock.com homepage, or at the bottom of our other website pages.

Information Collection and Use

Personally Identifiable Information:

The personally identifiable information you submit to our Websites is used to service your account, to improve our services to you and/or to provide you with information on BlackRock products and services. The types of personal information that may be collected at our Websites include: name, address, email address and telephone number. We will not sell, share or rent your personally identifiable information to others in contravention of this Privacy Policy.

Additionally, if the Website is a password protected site, then (a) once you submit your password and enter, the Website will recognize who you are and will collect all information that you submit, including all electronic instructions (including all transaction information), and (b) any information collected about you from the Website may be associated with other identifying information that we have about you.

Aggregate Information:

We generally record certain usage information, such as the number and frequency of visitors to our Websites. This information may include the websites that you access immediately before and after your visit to our Websites, the Internet browser you are using and your IP address. If we use such data at all it will be on an aggregate basis, and we will not disclose to third parties any information that could be used to identify you personally.

Service Providers

We may use internal service providers to operate our Websites and employ other persons to perform work on our behalf, such as sending postal mail and e-mail. These persons may have access to the personally identifiable information you submit through the Websites, but only for the purpose of performing their duties. These personnel may not use your personally identifiable information for any other purpose.

Compliance with Laws

We do not automatically collect personally identifiable information from visitors to our Websites, except to the extent we are required to do so pursuant to some statute or regulation applicable to us. We will not provide any personally identifiable information to any other persons, except if we are required to make disclosures by any law, any government or private parties in connection with a lawsuit, subpoena, investigation or similar proceeding.

E-mail and Marketing

BlackRock does not sell its customers’ e-mail addresses, nor will we provide your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes. BlackRock will not send you e-mail messages without first receiving your permission, unless it relates to servicing your account or unless you have consented to receiving electronic delivery of fund documents as part of our E-Delivery service. It is our policy to include instructions for unsubscribing from these permission-based programs. We recommend that you do not send us any individual personal information via non secure methods of correspondence, including via public electronic communication channels, such as Internet e-mail, which are generally not secure.

Business Transfers

If the business, stock or assets of BlackRock are acquired or merged with another business entity, we will share all or some of your information with this entity to continue to provide our service to you. You will receive notice of such an event and the new entity will inform you of any changes to the practices in this Privacy Policy. If the new entity wishes to make additional use of your information, you may decline such use at such time.

Disclosure to Third Parties

The personal information you provide to us will only be disclosed to third parties if we have your permission, or as set out in this Privacy Policy. We may disclose details about the general use of our Websites to third parties – for example, to demonstrate patterns of use to advertisers and other business partners. Information we pass on for this purpose will not include any personal information by which you may be identified. We endeavour to prevent unauthorised disclosures of your personal information by third parties but we are not responsible for any unauthorised disclosures or other breaches of security or for the actions of others if the information was passed to them with your authority or with the authority of anyone other than us or our group companies.

The information on cookies contained in this section is provided in accordance with European Union legislation introduced in May 2011.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored in your computer’s memory and hard drive when you visit certain web pages. They are used to enable websites to function or to provide information to the owners of a website.

Why do we use cookies?

Cookies help us to provide customised services and information. We use cookies on all our Websites to tell us, in general terms, how and when pages in our Websites are visited, what our users’ technology preferences are – such as what type of video player they use – and whether our Websites are functioning properly.

If you are using one of our password-protected sites, then the website may use cookies or other technology to help us authenticate you, store and recognise your configuration and user attributes, facilitate your navigation of the website and customise its content so that the information made available is likely to be of more interest to you.

In broad terms, we use cookies on our Websites for the following purposes:

• Analytical purposes. Analytical cookies allow us to recognise, measure and track visitors to our Websites. This helps us to improve and develop the way our Websites work, for example, by determining whether site visitors can find information easily, or by identifying the aspects of websites that are of the most interest to them.

• Usage preference s: Some of the cookies on our Websites are activated when visitors to our sites make a choice about their usage of the site. Our Websites then ‘remember’ the settings preferences of the user concerned. This allows us to tailor aspects of our sites to the individual user.

• Terms and conditions. We use cookies on our Websites to record when a site visitor has seen a policy, such as this one, or provided consent, such as consent to the terms and conditions on our Websites. This helps to improve the user’s experience of the site – for example, it avoids a user from repeatedly being asked to consent to the same terms.

• Session management. The software that runs our websites uses cookies for technical purposes needed by the internal workings of our servers. For instance, we use cookies to distribute requests among multiple servers, authenticate users and determine what features of the site they can access, verify the origin of requests, keep track of information about a user’s session and determine which options or pages to display in order for the site to function.

• Functional purposes. Functional purpose cookies store information that is needed by our applications to process and operate. For example, where transactions or requests within an application involve multiple workflow stages, cookies are used to store the information from each stage temporarily, in order to facilitate completion of the overall transaction or request.

Your cookie preferences

To make full use of BlackRock’s Websites, your computer or mobile device will need to accept cookies, as our sites will not function properly without them. In addition, cookies are required in order to provide you with personalised features on our Websites.

Local Flash Storage

On certain of our Websites, we include content designed for display using Adobe Flash Player, such as animations, videos and tools. Local flash storage (often referred to as “Flash cookies”) can be used to help improve your experience as a user. Flash storage is retained on your device in much the same way as standard cookies, but is managed directly by your Flash software.

If you wish to disable or delete information stored locally in Flash, please see the documentation for your Flash software, located at www.adobe.com. Please note that, if you disable Flash cookies, some site functionality may not work.

Third party cookies

When you visit our Websites, you may receive cookies that are set by third parties. These may include cookies set by Google, Unica, Forsee, Wall Street on Demand, Morningstar, Media Mind and/or Flurry. These cookies are used for the purposes described in the “Why Do We Use Cookies?” section of this policy. We do not control the setting of these third party cookies, so we suggest you might wish to check the third party websites for more information about their use of cookies and how to manage them.

Amending cookie preferences

If you wish to remove cookies set by our Websites from your browser in the future, you may delete them. The instructions for removing cookies from your computer or mobile device depend on the operating system and web browser you use. Please note, however, that withdrawing your agreement to the use of cookies on our sites will impair the functionality of the sites.

The site www.allaboutcookies.org includes instructions for managing cookies on many commonly used browses, or you may consult the vendor documentation for your specific software.

Further information about cookies

If you would like to find out more about cookies in general and how to manage them, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org .

Third Party Websites

BlackRock disclaims responsibility for the privacy policies and customer information practices of third party internet websites hyperlinked from our Website or this Privacy Policy.

Security

BlackRock protects your personal information when you transact business on our Website by requiring the use of a browser software program that supports industry standard SSL encryption with 128-bit key lengths. The 128-bit designation refers to the length of the key used to encrypt the data being transmitted, with a longer key representing a higher level of security.

Privacy Preferences:

This Site may contain information, including P3P privacy policies (Privacy Preference Information), intended to work with your selected privacy preferences. While we have tried to make such Privacy Preference Information included within this Site conform to this full-text Online Privacy Statement, this Online Privacy Statement is the definitive statement of privacy policies and practices for this Site.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, or our privacy related practices, please contact us by email at investor.services@blackrock.com or by phone at +44 (0) 800 445 522. You can also contact us by mail at:

BlackRock, Attention: Investor Services

12 Throgmorton Avenue

London

EC2N 2DL

If you have are an iShares investor, please contact us by email at feedback@iShares.com or by phone at +44 (0) 20 7668 8007. You can also contact us by mail at:

iShares Business Development