The Selecta (UK) Pension Plan has completed a £250m (€291m) full scheme buy-in with Legal & General covering liabilities for approximately 1,000 deferred and approximately 1,000 pensioner members.
The deal also significantly reduces future pension funding risk from plan sponsor Selecta UK Limited’s point of view, providing more business certainty for stakeholders and aligns with actions taken in supporting and securing members’ benefits, it announced.
Hymans Robertson was the lead transaction adviser, with legal advice provided by Pinsent Masons.
Dinesh Visavadia and Nita Tinn, both lead directors at Independent Trustee Services (ITS) as professional corporate sole trustee of the plan, said it was “pleasing to reach this point in the plan’s journey and secure members’ benefits with this buy-in”.
Kieran Mistry, senior risk transfer specialist at Hymans Robertson and lead adviser on the transaction, added: “As a professional corporate sole trustee, we were able to work swiftly and nimbly with ITS to take advantage of a short-term period of relative quiet in the buy-in market over the first half of 2021.”
He said the result was “a highly competitive broking process, with Legal & General presenting a compelling and tailored proposition”.
Celia Monteiro, director, pension risk transfer at Legal & General Retirement Institutional, said: “Working with pension schemes at all stages of their de-risking journey is fundamental to what we do at Legal & General and we are delighted that we have been chosen as the plan’s buy-in partner given their long-standing relationship with Legal & General Investment Management.”
Selecta UK, one of Europe’s largest coffee and vending machine operator, has an existing relationship with Legal & General, having worked with LGIM as its asset manager since 1992.
The firm said this enabled an “extremely smooth asset transfer”, with Legal & General also being able to lock to the plan’s existing assets which provided price certainty to the plan at an early stage of the buy-in process.
Just yesterday the UK pension plan for a global manufacturer of electronic test and measurement equipment announced a £250m (€291m) buy-in deal with Just Group.
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