Swedish trade union organisation PTK has urged the government to suspend the IORP II implementation rules it submitted to the Law Council on 16 May, saying the changes made since the original proposal do not go far enough.

PTK, the council for negotiation and cooperation — a joint organisation of 27 member unions representing 880,000 private-sector employees — published a letter it wrote to the government at the end of June, calling for more work on the proposal and criticising the Swedish legislative process itself.

In the letter, signed by the organisation’s pensions expert Dan Wallberg and lawyer Tomas Bern, PTK said that although the IORP II directive had been developed to take account of labour market conditions in each individual member state, in its bill the Swedish government had not taken advantage of this possibility.

“The proposal poses a threat to the Swedish (collective pensions) model, and the parties’ opportunities to negotiate occupational pensions within the framework of the system they have built up and financed,” the pair wrote.

The organisation said that no coherent analysis had been carried out into how occupational pensions in Sweden would be affected by the new rules, despite the fact that the government had had a long time to investigate, and said entities in the insurance industry needed more clarity on how these would affect their operations.

PTK urged the government to move forward with the proposal changes more quickly as the EU was now initiating proceedings against Sweden for its lack of implementation of IORP II.

One of PTK’s main tasks is managing the ITP occupational pension scheme, which covers 80% of salaried employees in Sweden.

Separately, the Swedish financial regulator Finansinspektionen (FI) yesterday published its proposal for new regulations on occupational pension business, which implement part of IORP II and complete the regulation with national supplements.

The draft regulation contains rules on how companies should calculate their technical provisions and risk-sensitive capital requirements, as well as provisions on pension companies’ capital bases; systems for corporate governance and investments, and the information that companies must provide to customers, FI said.

The authority is also putting forward new draft regulations and general advice on reporting and accounting.

It said that as a consequence of the new regulations, is it proposing that certain changes are also dealt with within existing regulations on information and reporting that apply to insurance companies.

The new rules are set to enter into force on 1 December 2019. The consultation period on the proposal is to run until 13 September.

 

 

 

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