The inaugural meeting on January 13 of the European Pensions Forum – set up to debate freedom of movement issues for supplementary pensions – produced a consensus to move forward and tackle issues such as transferability of pension rights, cross-border affiliation and long vesting periods. These would be discussed at a second forum mooted for July.
Dimitri Kontizas, an EC lawyer, says the majority of participants, which included UNICE, the European employers association and ETUC, the trade union representatives, also decided there was a need for mutual information shared between other parties in the Commission.
“The participants will react to the issues raised and write up their comments. Then we are going to tackle these problems in a meeting at the beginning of the summer.”