‘Ambitious’ Pension Partnership Names Chair

Michael O'Higgins LLPP Michael O’Higgins, chair, LLPPThe public pensions of London and Lancashire have appointed a former regulator to chair their £10 billion ($15 billion) asset management partnership.

Michael O’Higgins, former chair of the UK’s Pensions Regulator, is the first major appointment for the London and Lancashire Pensions Partnership (LLPP), which aims to launch in April 2016.

Alongside O’Higgins will be three non-executive directors, to be announced in the coming weeks, as well as Skip McMullan, representing the London Pension Fund Authority (LPFA), and David Borrow, deputy leader of Lancashire County Council.

Sir Merrick Cockell, chair of the LPFA, said the appointment of the “highly respected” O’Higgins was “a real testament to what we are trying to achieve”.

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O’Higgins has held a number of top board positions for UK organizations, including chair of the Audit Commission and a non-executive director at HM Treasury. He currently chairs the National Health Service Confederation and the remuneration committee of Network Rail, which manages and maintains the UK’s railways. He has a degree in economics from Trinity College, Dublin, and a master’s degree in social policy from the London School of Economics.

O’Higgins described the collaboration between Lancashire County Pension Fund and the LPFA as an “ambitious project that could completely change the face of the public sector pension industry”.

“I applied for this role because I believe what Lancashire and London are doing with this partnership is exactly what should happen across local government, and indeed the wider pension sector, to help secure better benefits for members,” O’Higgins added.

The LLPP is one of the most advanced public pension collaborations in the UK, alongside a project to pool common mandates among London’s pension funds. The country’s government has announced radical plans to push through such collaboration projects for all funds, with Chancellor George Osborne last week declaring that he wanted the 89 pensions to be merged into six “British Wealth Funds”, creating the scale to invest effectively in infrastructure.

Major European asset owners and managers have written to car manufacturers demanding details of political lobbying over emissions legislation.

A group of 19 institutions—including four of Sweden’s AP funds—contacted nine companies for the information, in the wake of the exposure of Volkswagen’s use of software to manipulate emissions data in millions of its cars. The scandal led to the resignation of its CEO and a collapse in its share price.

Signatories to the letters include Sweden’s AP2, AP3, AP4, and AP7, alongside the UK’s Environment Agency Pension Fund, Finnish insurer Ilmarinen, and asset managers AXA IM and WHEB Group.

The investors demanded information about the companies’ lobbying and their stances regarding new emissions standards in the US and Europe. The car manufacturers contacted include Volkswagen, BMW, Honda, Daimler, General Motors, Ford, Fiat, Peugeot, and Toyota.

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The letters also requested disclosure of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association’s (EAMA) activities. It emerged last week that the association had lobbied European politicians for a delay to rules that would cap how much nitrogen oxide cars could emit. A separate letter was sent by the investors to Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and Nissan and chair of the EAMA.

A statement from ShareAction, one of the investor groups that helped co-ordinate the letters, said the details requested “could be crucial for investors in predicting future crises like the one at Volkswagen”.

Volkswagen’s share price has dipped by 26% since the start of September, following revelations that software installed in approximately 11 million of its cars sold since 2009 may have falsified emissions data. Regulators are investigating the firm’s activities and at least one US state has threaten to sue over the scandal.