Paul Audu

Paul Audu (full name Paul Abdul-Abbass Audu, born August 1966, British) is a UK local-government finance professional specialising in pension-fund investment and treasury management. He served as Interim Head of Pensions & Treasury at the London Borough of Merton, where he appears in the Merton Pension Fund Annual Report 2016/17. He is now Interim Head of Pensions and Treasury at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, a role he has held since around January 2024, where he authors and presents the council's Treasury Management Strategy, Investment Strategy and Capital Strategy reports to the Pensions and Audit Committees.

In this capacity Audu is responsible for the stewardship and investment strategy of a Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) fund and for the council's treasury operations — governed by the Local Government Act 2003, the CIPFA Treasury Management Code, and MHCLG (now MHCLG/Treasury) guidance on local-authority investments. This is an institutional, fiduciary investment role overseeing a multi-hundred-million-pound public pension fund, not an angel or venture-capital practice.

The "Angel Investors / Seed Round" label in the source stub appears to be a data-aggregation error. Companies House records do show Audu as a company director of small private ventures — notably Lift Coffee Limited (director since October 2018) and, historically, several dissolved companies including LGPSNET Limited (a pensions-related entity), Electricity Pensions Trustee Limited (resigned 2012), Beauty Parade International Limited, and Studebt Limited. These are his own or trustee directorships rather than a portfolio of startup angel investments, and they are the most likely source of the mislabel.

• Institutional, not venture. His "check writing" is asset allocation within an LGPS pension fund and council treasury portfolio — bonds, equities, infrastructure, and pooled LGPS vehicles — under statutory codes, not seed-stage equity tickets.
• Local growth and regeneration. Audu has publicly engaged with the UK government's push for LGPS funds to invest more in UK infrastructure and place-based regeneration. He has argued that pension funds can and arguably *should* help "kickstart local growth and regeneration."
• Sustainable, place-led investment. In a 2025 Local Government Chronicle roundtable he framed sustainable investment as bringing together "places, people and planet," stating that "just building for the sake of building doesn't cut it" and that government must support planning regulation so funds are "building places that attract people, where families can settle."
• Compliance-first mandate. He repeatedly grounds investment decisions in legal obligation — the Local Government Act 2003, the CIPFA code, and MHCLG investment guidance — reflecting a risk-managed, fiduciary posture rather than a high-risk early-stage appetite.