On the go: The Pensions Regulator has suspended a pension scheme trustee after detectives launched a fraud investigation.
Titan, the North West regional organised crime unit, is investigating Gordon Craig in connection with his role as a trustee of Optimum Retirement Benefits Plan and other pension schemes.
The pensions watchdog’s determinations panel has decided that it is “overwhelmingly in the interests of scheme members and for the protection of scheme assets” for Mr Craig to be suspended from acting as a trustee on any scheme while the investigation continues.
From 2015, a total of £13.4m was transferred to Optimum Retirement Benefits Plan from the pension schemes of 288 people, and in some cases members were cold-called to persuade them to transfer.
After members transferred their pensions to the scheme, they received loans from businesses linked to Craig. This was for as much as 75 per cent of their funds, and is known as pension liberation. Introducers were also paid tens of thousands of pounds in fees.
The remaining funds not paid out as loans to members were invested in illiquid, high-risk investments including gem-mining.
Craig, an insolvency practitioner, paid himself nearly £500,000 from scheme funds in 12 months.
The regulator decided that Dalriada Trustees should be appointed as an independent trustee to Optimum Retirement Benefits Plan to act in the place of Craig and other trustees to the scheme. It said that this will protect other pension holders by preventing them from transferring their funds into the scheme.
The determinations panel noted that several people involved in the setting up or running of Optimum Retirement Benefits Plan and linked schemes had been convicted of dishonesty offences.
Martin Dowd and Robert Winstanley had been jailed for money-laundering while Richard Jones was convicted of the same crime and given a suspended prison sentence.
In its determination notice on the appointment of an independent trustee to the scheme, the panel said: “The permission of activity that appears to be pensions liberation strongly suggests that Mr Craig, if he has the knowledge and skill of a pensions trustee, is not exercising it properly.”
It added: “The highly illiquid and high-risk investments, several of which appear to have failed, is consistent only with Mr Craig not having or exercising the necessary knowledge and skill.”
Optimum Financial Solutions Limited, the sponsoring employer of Optimum Retirement Benefits Plan, was wound up in the public interest by the High Court earlier this year following an Insolvency Service investigation.
