Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 518
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Features
Norway and Iceland missed out on pensions directive
The European Economic Area states of Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein have seemingly been left out in the cold regarding the adoption of the European occupational pension funds directive. “The directive has not been passed in the Joint Committee for the EEA EFTA states,” according to a European Free Trade Association ...
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Features
Mandatory call in Germany
The German Union Federation (DGB) has urged the government to make it compulsory for employers to offer corporate pensions to their employees. Speaking in Berlin, DGB vice chairman Ursula Engelen-Kefer said the move was necessary to, in the first place, compensate for future reductions in the state pension. As a ...
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Features
When the balance sheet rules
IPE asked three pension funds – in Portugal, the UK and Denmark – the same question: ‘What do you see as the implications of the implementation of IAS 19?’ Here are their answers: Colin Hartridge-Price, scheme secretary and chief pensions officer at the BT Pensions Scheme & BT Retirement ...
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Features
Bill of rights for the mobile
The European Commission’s proposal for a directive on improving the portability of supplementary pension rights, if accepted, could significantly improve the position of mobile workers – both across borders and within member states – but about which many concerns have been expressed regarding excessive costs. Vladimir Spidla, the European commissioner ...
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Features
The practical realities
There was much fanfare and press coverage about the pensions directive, which was finally a legal requirement from 23 September 2005. In comparison, the proposed portability directive has received relatively little in the way of media attention – but the financial consequences of this legislation are far more worrying for ...
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Features
Russian evolution
The new Russian pension system, based on the Swedish funded system, was launched on 1 January 2002 when the new pension legislation was enacted. Originally, males born before 1952 and females born before 1956, did not get the right to participate in the funded pension pillar. For everyone else, employers ...
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Features
RBC Dexia's optimism
Monkey fingers, toe-jam football, joo joo eyeballs and walrus gumboots not unsurprisingly failed to put in an appearance, but when Royal Bank of Canada’ s Global Services, its securities services operation and Luxembourg-based Dexia BIL announced last summer that they were to come together to form a new joint venture, ...
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Special Report
Actions speak louder...
The Netherlands is a market which we generally consider to be among the most advanced in terms of institutional investing including attitudes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). But when VBDO, the Dutch Sustainable Investment Association, looked at the voting behaviour of major Dutch institutional investors regarding 280 shareholder proposals at ...
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Features
DB back from the dead
When hedge funds, investment banks and private equity firms get involved it’s a sure sign that there’s some potentially serious money to be made. So what’s the hot new market they’re looking at? You might be surprised to learn that it’s the previously unglamorous field of defined benefit (DB) corporate ...
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Features
Holding to your course
Anyone searching for evidence that the dash from equities into fixed income by pension funds was not a universal phenomenon in the UK need look no further than the West Midlands Pension Fund. The Wolverhampton-based fund, with assets of around £7bn (e9.5bn 8.6bn) administers the Local Government Pensions Scheme (LGPS), ...
