Posted by Brian Marks on 13 July 2001 at 19:26:11:
In Reply to: Correspondence files posted by Fran Lloyd on 10 July 2001 at 16:36:51:
Fran,
May 2000 is before I was awake to this affair, so I can't help with the first question, but I can give some context to the "Why" question.
There is a lot that retirees cannot know about what happened in 1996. Because the Internal Disputes Resolution Process does not apply to IBM, only to the Trust, IBM can retreat behind responses made up of standard paragraphs that effectively just say "everything was proper". Eventually they have to say more if the Ombudsman asks, but what is said then is confidential forever (unless the Ombudsman tells the public).
So members have to form their opinions from what is in the public domain, which includes what the Trust has said in response to some complaints. We cannot learn from individual trustees - any opinion they have gets filtered by the board, with its IBM-chosen majority, before we get it. We know this much:
Member elected trustees were introduced to reduce the risk that existed where trusts had all their trustees chosen by the company - the risk that the trust would unduly favour company interests over member interests. In December 1996, at the last meeting of the IBM Trust before elected trustees became mandatory, some massive structural changes to the IBM pension setup were made; it was decided to close the C-plan, introduce the M-plan, and fund the M-plan in a particular way. This made it harder, maybe impossible, for the trustees at later meetings to do anything about the situation they inherited. The situation they inherited was that the funds made it comfortably affordable to move the pensions-in-payment away from being the worst for all comparable companies towards the norm that the vast majority of members of similar schemes enjoy; but the plan was to spend nothing on that.
You will know, if you have read the complaints, that some retirees think that particular parts of this behaviour, and the overall behaviour, were illegal. (Part of the reason employees worked for IBM was the promise that IBM would aim to be one of the best for pension benefits - has that bargain been honoured?)
These complaints took a while to surface, because the clues for retirees were inconspicuous - any extra word here on a heading in the members' report, a record of a relatively small amount moved from here to there,...
Whether you think the complaints will make a dent in the wall put up by IBM lawyers or not, the complaints cannot be simply dismissed. (If they could, OPAS would not have supported their consideration by the Ombudsman.)
So the answer to your question about why Barrie Morgans might have said what
it was claimed he said could be that IBM knew that what happened in 1996 was
questionable, and hoped it would not be questioned. Barrie was an IBM employee
at the time, appointed by IBM to the trust.