Urgent news
(1) Cold calling by phone The ICO has fined a cold-calling pensions operation around £130,000 (ICO fines company £130,000 for unauthorised pensions cold calls, ICO Press release, 10 September 2020). What they did was illegal and wrong; they made 107,000 calls, but their efforts don’t seem to have yielded much. Looking at their accounts, the company seems to have around £5,000 in assets, so good luck to the ICO on collecting. It might be time to make regulatory grandstanding illegal; it gives a misleading impression to the public that something is being done.
Usually none of this superficial regulatory activity makes much difference to the consumer; and if the calls had been routed through Spain for example, the citizens would have been equally misled – and fines would not have been imposed. What should have happened was for the regulator to apply for a ex-parte immediate court order to disconnect the phone-lines, and the perpetrators brought before the courts within a day or two. Anything else is pointless.
(2) Insurance fraud penalty Look for example at what happened (those of a sensitive disposition look away now) to Julija Adlesic, a 22 year old Slovenian woman who was found guilty of deliberately sawing off her own hand as part of an insurance fraud (Woman who sawed off own hand found guilty of fraud, BBC News, 12 September 2020). That’s what you call a scam.
The good news is that although she and her boyfriend had intentionally left the severed hand behind rather than bringing it with them to the hospital, to ensure the disability was permanent, the authorities recovered it in time to sew it back on. She got two years jail; presumably that will act as a deterrent to stop her doing that again. And don’t try this at home.
(3) Cannabis companies must pay pensions We all know that sex-workers must pay tax (https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/jge9bx/how-to-file-taxes-sex-work) although the costs of their accoutrements (eg lingerie; add according to taste) are deductible; sex-working is not illegal in the UK, but the moral conflict for HMRC, by collecting tax, remains. There is a similar but different issue in the States. Rather like auto-enrolment in the UK, compulsory workplace provision has been introduced in California, where there are (under California law) legal cannabis businesses.
The dilemma in the States however is that cannabis businesses are illegal under federal tax and pensions law. So the question is: can a cannabis business write off its state-required pension contributions against federal tax payments? (see California mandates cannabis companies to provide retirement plans by September 30, FisherBroyles, 12 September 2020). We shouldn’t smile. On this side of the pond it is illegal in the UK for UK pension funds to invest in leisure-based cannabis businesses even where they are legal where they are based, eg California or Canada. On top of things as ever the FCA has just issued hesitant guidance on investing in cannabis companies in the UK and abroad (Statement: listings of cannabis-related businesses, FCA, 18 September 2020).
Women’s pensions
The campaign to compensate women who had expected to gain their state pension at 60 (or said they had) was rebuffed possibly conclusively by the Court of Appeal on 15 September 2020 (Delve v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2020] 086 PBLR (037), [2020] EWCA Civ 1199). Meanwhile, Sir Steve Webb, the former pensions minister and currently a partner at LCP, is running a national petition to ensure the DWP check that married women have not suffered inadvertent state pension underpayments.
Under the former system married women could claim a basic state pension at 60 per cent of the full rate based on their husband’s contributions, where this would be bigger than the pension they would get based on their own contributions. Since 17 March 2008, this uplift should have been applied automatically but before this date, a married woman had to make a ‘second claim’ to have her state pension increased when her husband turned 65 – and many women did not make that claim.
It may be that the petition is misconceived; perhaps it would be better if TPR were empowered to apply its usual sanctions on the Minister and Secretary of State, or even if it lacks the powers, simply to make a critical statement, on the principle that the rule of law should apply equally to the state and the citizen.
Tontines
Young lawyers (especially in the North) were always trained that tontines were illegal. A tontine is a last-man-standing system under which miners chipped in a few shillings into a pot every time they went on a shift, and the last man living scooped the pool. Because of the temptation to pull the odd pit-prop, we were taught, they are against public policy – and illegal (see Kent McKeever, A Short History of Tontines [2009] 15(2) Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law; and www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/tontinesfortoday; https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/02/19/1519047160000/Someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet–tontine-tokens–Update-/; Jeff Guo, It’s sleazy, it’s totally illegal, and yet it could become the future of retirement, Washington Post, 28 September 2015).
It now turns out that there is no law or even case decision that outlaws them – and of course, in a way, pension schemes, or at least DB schemes, are the ultimate tontine. The FCA is not sure about the legal position, but academics seem pretty sanguine – and now there are initiatives to try and reintroduce them as a form of pension system (see www.tontinetrust.com), especially as CDC arrangements begin to enter the market.
Hard to believe, but true. . .
Chris Grayling has had a number of jobs in government including transport and justice (he was the first non-lawyer to have served as Lord Chancellor for at least 440 years). He has now been appointed as an adviser to Hutchinson Ports (which operates Harwich and Felixstowe) and his fee is £100,000 pa for seven hours work a week for a year. If you want to watch the parent group’s stock price, it is quoted in Hong Kong, with the price currently a shade under $50HK. It might be intriguing to see if the hedge funds are beginning to short. . .
