Companies in the UK have used a controversial insolvency procedure to offload £3.8bn of pension liabilities, often as part of a sale to existing directors or owners, a Financial Times investigation has found.
Roughly 17 per cent of the 868 schemes managed by the Pension Protection Fund, a lifeboat of last resort for the retirement plans of failed companies, have been injected as a result of so-called pre-pack administrations. These often secretive transactions allow struggling businesses to be sold even as they are declared insolvent.
The FT investigation found that two in three pre-pack schemes entering the PPF involved sales to existing owners or directors.
A string of prominent cases that used pre-pack arrangements, but where …
Read the full article at: https://www.ft.com/content/f3f574fa-0f2c-11e7-a88c-50ba212dce4d