A website offering to prematurely unlock pensions worth more than £15,000 is either “a fraud, a lie, or both”, PM has been told.

The website sellmyukpension.com claims it provides a unique service in offering to purchase UK stakeholder, self-invested personal pension, personal pension, company and money purchase schemes “at the best possible prices”.

The government’s Money Advice Service (MAS), launched last month, has been heavily criticised by advisers for being a dangerous and misleading tool, particularly for pension products.

The website claims to offer “free, unbiased advice”, but the guidance on offer is unregulated, meaning any consumer who follows the advice and purchases a product will not be able to take the service to task if the product is in fact the wrong choice for them.

The Pensions Regulator’s decision to settle the Bonas case by issuing a contribution notice (CN) of £60,000 was described as “in particularly bad grace” by a leading lawyer.

Jennie Kreser, partner at Silverman Sherliker, commented: “[The settlement] makes clear the regulator does not feel bound to follow the approach taken by [judge Nick] Warren.

Shadow pensions minister Rachel Reeves is to meet Michael Johnson of the Centre for Policy Studies, who backs limiting tax relief on pensions to 20% of income, coupled with a maximum 20% income tax in retirement.

This could generate billions of pounds of tax revenue, which Johnson believes the should be spent on boosting the state pension to deal with poverty in retirement.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) wrote to price comparison websites last month, proposing guidance and highlighting concerns it has around the fair treatment of customers.

One particular notion proposed by the FSA was that firms should take responsibility for checking eligibility or disclosure, rather than putting the onus on the customer, mirroring the insurance bill going through the Houses of Parliament at the moment.

The new flexible drawdown rules could have an impact on qualified overseas recognised pension schemes (QROPS), following one financial planner’s investigations into the Isle of Man (IOM).

Andrew Johnston, partner at Holden and Partners, told PM one client benefited from using the flex drawdown rules, rather than going into a QROPS or other structure, because of the size of the pension fund and a cap on the level of tax payable, due to double tax treaties.

Pension-busting practices through qualifying recognised overseas pension schemes (QROPS) has a strong correlation with countries going through economic turmoil, according to Mike Lightfoot, pensions director at Close Trustees Guernsey.

Suffolk Life has launched a new platform self-invested personal pension (Sipp) .

The SmartSipp is a self-invested wrapper offering flexible investment options with administration. There will be a choice of platforms, with initial partners including Cofunds, Fidelity, Ascentric, Raymond James, and Seven Investment Management.

Not quite as exciting as the Royal Wedding, but the ticket allocations have brought the 2012 Olympics well and truly into focus. The excitement is building and there is a definite air of positive expectation of Britannia being cool again.

Two-thirds of UK companies believe at least 20% of their staff will opt out of pensions, when they are auto-enrolled from next year.

Research from the Tax Incentivised Savings Assocation (Tisa) published in June shows employers cite the affordability of saving as the main reason for people leaving schemes.

Steve Webb has faith in his working group to come up with a solution to the problems facing the open market option (OMO).

Speaking to PM, the pensions minister said a great deal of discussion was going on with the Department for Work and Pensions, the Treasury, the Pension Income Choice Association (Pica) chaired by Tom McPhail, and the Association of British Insurers.

There will be no big government advertising campaign for the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) or auto-enrolment in 2012.

The government has a statutory duty to communicate the changes, but it is hampered by a cutback on PR and advertising activity, while Nest has said it will only communicate with employers, their advisers and its members through paper and online-based communications.

Independent expert advice you can trust. That’s what it says on the bottom of the cover of the Which? Tax Handbook 2011/12.

I generally reserve judgment when I see the use of what I would consider rhetoric. But I had to backtrack when I realised this book had been written by financial journalist Tony Levene.

Unlike the vast majority of media material produced about those lucky few who have stuck a few quid away, this next book doesn’t extend emaciated arms in the hope of laying a hand on our modern day saints – celebrities.

Instead, it showcases a dozen highly suc-cessful private investors in case study form.

Have you heard?...

Things you didn’t know about people in the industry and what they get up to

Friends Life has allocated £10m to developing a specialist annuity proposition, as UK life companies prepare for auto-enrolment.

The insurer plans to use the investment team from recently integrated Axa, alongside former defined benefit (DB) derisking specialist David Still, who will head up its post and at-retirement business.

Small to medium-sized defined benefit schemes are being offered the opportunity to cut liabilities at lower than cost price through enhanced annuities.

The opportunity lies in health assessments of senior staff with large pension rights who have unhealthy lifestyles or serious ailments.

Genetic tests could be used to determine the value of enhanced annuities within six years, once they receive government backing.

The possibility is fresh on the agenda after a new over-the-counter test was unveiled by Life Length, a company that measures the length of telomeres – a piece of DNA that prevents chromosome degradation – to gauge how fast a person is ageing.

Trustees and fund managers will expect Glencore’s corporate governance to improve now it has joined the FTSE 100, governance experts have warned.

The FTSE 100 has traditionally been seen as a relatively safe investment for UK pension funds due to standards imposed by the UK Corporate Governance Code.

Companies giving executive directors excessive cash sums via in-lieu-of-pension payments will be condemned by the High Pay Commission report due later in June.

An increasing number of directors in high profile companies now receive in-lieu-of-pension payments worth half their annual salary, the report has found.

Pressure from scheme members to see excessive pay tackled publicly is forcing Hermes Equity Ownership Services to change how it engages with companies.

Members of the BT pension fund and around one-third of the other pension fund clients of Hermes Equity Ownership Services are calling for the change.

The Pension Protection Fund (PPF) has received more than £30m for its shares in Heath Lambert, six years after it bailed the company out.

The insurance broker was saved from insolvency when the lifeboat took its pension schemes into assessment in 2005, in exchange for a stake in the business.

A handful of charities are due to become the first employers to enter the National Employment Savings Trust (Nest) in July.

The pilots were supposed to be participating in the scheme from April. Nest is remaining tightlipped on the reason for the delay, but it is believed to be a mixture of compliance and IT difficulties.

Morgan Stanley is touting a corporate wealth management tool to UK businesses, in a bid to join the burgeoning corporate wrap market.

The investment bank currently has a number of company clients in the US, using its LifeView tool, but has hired its former marketing manager Richard Foster to sell it to British businesses.

A tax anomaly will start to hit millions more UK savers under the new annual allowance regime, the government has confirmed.

You could almost hear ‘Eye of the Tiger’ by the aptly named band Survivor playing in the background. Because following the chaos that hedge funds have gone through during the past two years – with the whirlwind of ups and downs, investors being torn between the prospects of an economic rebound and the fear of a double-dip – the hedge fund industry has fully risen from its post-crisis ashes and even managed to globally break through the $2trn (£1.2trn) barrier. Last month alone, the hedge class saw a 1.4% increase in returns, its highest level since June 2008.

Regulators should be careful to ensure governance requirements are proportionate to different types of schemes in order to secure good member outcomes across the board

The Pensions Regulator is now considering responses to its recent discussion paper on how to enable good member outcomes in workplace pension provision.

These last few weeks have found me once more preaching the auto-enrolment gospel of Paradigm Pensions around the many counties of our fair land. Engaged in this pursuit I was somewhere or other a few days ago when I received an email from out of the swirling ether; it was despatched by my redoubtable PA, Ms Bruun.

Section 615 schemes offer similar flexibility as QROPS for those working abroad, but have the added advantages of disregarding domicile and allowing drawdown from age 55

Section 615 schemes are the best pension scheme you have never heard of. If you are an individual thinking of overseas employment, currently working overseas or a financial adviser, accountant or multinational employer, then you should really be investigating.

A new model for financial management is emerging, heralding significant prospects for providers and employers if they can tailor options to best suit their clients

It is clear the delivery model for personal financial services is set to change. From where I sit, the journey to a new model is already underway. How long this will take is hard to predict, but how it will look at the end of its journey is clear to see.

Less than a year into the job, shadow pensions minister Rachel Reeves has got her teeth into some important areas of pension legislation. But might this be at the expense of more crucial issues, asks Pensions Management?

Some DFMs are easier to assess than others though there appears to be a disparity in performance across the industry.

The firms who reposition themselves wisely will benefit most post RDR, when the sector is anticipated to really come into its own

This year’s Pension and Investment Provider Award winners celebrate their industry success with a night at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel

Even those with greater wealth have been struggling to build sufficient retirement savings, but some products allow individuals to keep more of their money away from the taxman

For some years, industry commentators have voiced concerns that high net worth individuals (HNWIs) are likely to see any benefit from pension saving disappear as the government seeks to squeeze more money out of the higher paid and into the exchequer.

The talk last year was of tax relief being limited to the basic rate (see http://bit.ly/tax_cap) and it would appear the opposition is also thinking how it might approach a similar policy (see http:/bit.ly/20pertax).

BlackRock has appointed Gary Smith as head of pensions administration services. In his new role, Smith will lead the development of BlackRock’s defined contribution (DC) administration proposition to support its DC service.

Carey Pensions and Benefits has appointed Tim Bush as executive director in Guernsey.

Bush will lead a team responsible for qualified registered overseas pension schemes, international schemes, employee share schemes, and Guernsey pension schemes.

Barnett Waddingham has promoted seven of its senior client advisers to partner and 13 members of staff to the position of associate. The total number of partners is now 50.

The new partners are Mark Futcher, Julian Mainwood and Vanessa Smart in Amersham, Paul Hubbold, Ben Pullen and Ruth Thomas in Bromsgrove, and Ben Roach in Leeds.

It really is too much. The industry has spent the last however many years working with government(s) and its agencies to deliver a brave new world for financial services.

A major part of that has been the painfully slow and confused development of what the retail distribution retail (RDR) will in fact deliver.

Now, the FSA has thrown a great big oversized spanner in the works with the launch (and release) of the Money Advice Service (MAS).