Brussels, 27/01/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 25 January, the European Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee decided on its negotiating position for the revision of the occupational pensions institutions directive (OPI II), thus paving the way for talks with the EU Council of Ministers (see EUROPE 11215).
“I look forward to starting negotiations with the Council under the Dutch Presidency in the coming weeks. I am confident that we can get a good outcome agreed within the lifetime of their Presidency,” explained rapporteur Brian Hayes (EPP, Ireland) in a press release, adding: “To get agreement from five different political groups from opposing sides of the political spectrum is a strong signal to the Council.”
Unveiled by the European Commission in March 2011 as part of an initiative to promote long-term financing of the economy, the draft review of the OPE II directive relates to governance and transparency in the work of occupational pensions bodies.
Although the initial proposal suggested that each pension fund board member should be required to be sufficiently skilled and have sufficient expertise for the job, the EP and the member states prefer this requirement to apply to the board collectively.
On the question of transparency, the Commission's proposal recommends a detailed “pension benefit statement” be provided for beneficiaries by pension funds and is considering a delegated act of legislation requiring national supervisory bodies to provide a detailed description of the required information. This is felt by the EP and Council to be over-prescriptive, which have both scrapped it to the delight of some of the pensions industry, PensionsEurope, for instance.
“Parliament has also scaled back a huge amount of the information requirements that was in the Commission's original proposal. We want to ensure that members are properly informed about their pension scheme. But imposing vast swaths of prescriptive information that would be harmonised all across the EU is not the way to proceed. Members of a pension scheme need the essential information. Pension funds should be able to provide this information to members without having to communicate complex financial data.”
The rapporteur highlights major differences between the views of the EP committee and the member states. “Unlike the Council position, we have ensured that cross-border pension funds do not have to be fully funded at all times” including difficult times for the financial markets, explained Hayes.
For the cross-border transfer of pension schemes, the EP says that regulators, in cooperation with EIOPA, can have oversight or a 'duty of care' of a pension transfer but the final decision must rest with members and beneficiaries of a pension scheme capital. “The Council also wanted to bring in new rules to say that regulators from both transferring and receiving member states must approve a cross-border transfer of a pension scheme. Allowing regulators to block transfers is completely inconsistent with the ideals of a single market and free movement of capital,” said the rapporteur. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)