Food wholesaler Sligro to join Achmea’s consolidation vehicle

The €370m pension fund of Dutch food wholesaler Sligro is to join the general pension fund (APF) Centraal Beheer.

Centraal Beheer, a subsidiary of Achmea, said that accrued pension rights and future accrual would be transferred to the consolidation vehicle as of 1 October.

Pensioenfonds Sligro has almost 11,000 participants in total, 4,600 of whom are active members and 800 of whom are pensioners.

With the addition of the Sligro scheme, Centraal Beheer’s APF will grow to €1.9bn of assets under management and 45,000 participants, according to a spokesman for Achmea.

This would rank the general pension fund as the third biggest in the Netherlands, after Aegon’s APF Stap (€5.8bn) and Het Nederlandse Pensioenfonds, owned by insurer ASR (€3.5bn).

The Sligro scheme is transfer to a separate section of Centraal Beheer, the third scheme to do so after the Dutch pension funds of Royal Bank of Scotland and brewer Bavaria.

Centraal Beheer APF also operates four different defined benefit sections as well as a defined contribution compartment.

In 2016, the Sligro Pensioenfonds said it would remain independent. However, its annual report for 2018 indicated that it had changed its mind after its administration costs rose from €197 to €217 per member, as a consequence of higher costs for board support and increasing regulatory pressures.

The scheme also cited the limited availability of new trustees and expiring contracts with the scheme’s asset manager BMO and its administrator AZL.

The annual report also revealed that the Sligro scheme had decided against joining the €1.3bn sector scheme for the wholesale food sector (Bpf Foodservice), citing “pension-technical and organisational reasons”. Sligro and its pension fund declined to provide further details.

Earlier this year, Centraal Beheer APF attracted the €60m company scheme Scildon as well as the employers Yarden and Afval Terminal Moerdijk (ATM). Yarden and ATM were clients of the Delta Lloyd APF, which was liquidated following the takeover of its parent company by NN Group.

Other Dutch pension funds planning to join an APF – a consolidation model rapidly gaining traction in the Netherlands – include automotive organisation ANWB and synthetics firm Invista Netherlands, as well as Ortec and former pension fund Jan Huysman Wz. The latter two are clients of Volo, run by PGGM. The pensions provider plans to shut down its APF.