Thorn Retirees Win  They saved their pension fund £50M that would otherwise have gone towards company profit.  This was achieved by influencing the trustees, not because the regulators (OPRA) ruled in their favour.

The media has recorded a "victory" for the British Airways pensioners in the Court of Appeal.  This is part of a long running defence of their scheme by the BA members.  You may recall a previous connection with IBM, noted in a letter to Jim Lamb from Dave Mitchell:

"Your description of its constitution fails to mention that one of the 'independent Trustee Directors with a wealth of experience in Pension matters' is the chief executive of British Airways Pensions Investment Management Limited. I presume that it is pure coincidence that BA was until recently intent on using the surplus in their Final Salary scheme to subsidise their ailing Money Purchase scheme along very similar lines to IBM's. That decision was reversed only after intense and sustained pressure from its members."

The latest BA decision was not about something that had been done, but about how the deeds of the BA trust should be interpreted in future.  It was a case about "surplus" so the relevant circumstances may never occur. The essential question was what the trustees could do when required to "dispose of" a surplus that the actuary had calculated.  The decision was that they could just put some of it aside as a "reserve" but they could not pay it out to British Airways.  They would have to specify the purpose of the reserve.   There is nothing specially pertinent to the IBM affair in this decision, but there are useful general remarks by the judge.  (For example, "a provision of a trust deed must be interpreted in the light of the factual situation at the time it was created."; our trust deed was created in 1957.)