Employers and employees have been paying pension contributions into their pension fund since 1985. To date, thousands of pension funds throughout Switzerland have saved more than CHF 1 trillion in pension money. Tellco Holding was one of the first to combine pension funds and financial service providers under one roof – others followed this model. More and more pension funds took over these pension holding companies. Because managing pension funds is a lucrative business that the supervisory authorities can hardly see through anymore.
Criticism of Tellco’s holding structure
Tellco Holding writes on Sunday that it is managing its pension assets in a security-oriented manner with a long-term horizon and will be granting policyholders an interest rate of 2 percent for 2021 instead of the previous 1 percent. The fact remains: Tellco’s holding structure has been criticized behind closed doors for years without anything happening.
Explosive: a former Schwyz national councilor has been a co-owner of Tellco Holding for years. And even today, numerous members of parliament are active in the provision market. Parliament is responsible for the precautionary laws and thus for supervision. SRF and “SonntagsBlick” confronted members of parliament with their BVG research and asked what exactly was going wrong.
Demand for effective supervision
Andri Silberschmidt, National Council ZH/FDP, replies: “It’s not okay if you pocket profits at the expense of the insured, that’s not the idea of the pension fund system.” Melanie Mettler, National Councilor BE/GLP, calls for supervision: “We need supervision that recognizes the black sheep and is capable of acting to prevent this nonsense.”
The supervisory authority, in turn, refers to the parliament, which is actually responsible for the federal pension fund supervisory authority (OAK BV). Manfred Hüsler, Director of OAK BV, confirms this: “The OAK does what it can with the existing laws. We do that with our right to issue directives, but certain instruments and structures require a change in the law.”
So far only advances against the pension fund supervisory authority
In fact, however, in recent years Parliament has only submitted proposals to weaken supervision. And the senders have always been members of parliament who are themselves active in the BVG market or are associated with it.
The advances were made by Alex Kuprecht, Councilor of States SVP/SZ, submitted. “I submitted the requests because the regional foundation supervisors were of the opinion that the OAK had performed tasks that it should not perform by law.” Then you could have changed the law right away if you had wanted to.
Barbara Gysi, National Councilor SP/SG, says: “I think it’s time to show again that it’s the asset management companies that want more money to be paid in so that they can manage more assets.”