By Jude Njoku

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Senate probe on the old pensions scheme known as Deferred Pensions scheme, which has unearthed massive fraud in the scheme, the Managing Director of Penman Pensions Limited, Mr. Wilson Ideva has assured contributors to  the new Contributory Pensions Scheme, CPS,  that their money is safe.

Ideva who highlighted the differences between the old pensions scheme and the new one, premised his assurance on the regulatory mechanism put in place by the National Pensions Commission, PenCom.

Ideva who spoke at an interactive session with newsmen in Lagos said: “ There is a misconception between the old scheme and the new scheme. Under the old scheme, the funds are being managed by different ministries such as civil servants under the office of Head of Service and the Police under the Police Pensions Commission and the military under the Military Pensions Board.

These are mostly overseen by the Head of Service or by different ministers and there is no uniform regulation. That is largely the problem that they have and there is no division of responsibility between the managers of the fund and the keepers of the fund. So, I can decide what to do; how to do it and it largely depends on the individual’s honesty and you know that a business is not designed to address individuals honest.

A business or an entity is such that there must be separation of duty so that even the most honest person would not be tempted and the worst person would be deterred from doing the wrong things. Those were the problems with the old scheme. Under the new scheme, there is a division of responsibility. You have a uniform regulation under the National Pensions Commission.

They set the rules and norms and you have to abide by it. You also have the people that keep the funds which we refer to as the Pensions Fund custodians are quite different from the managers of the fund.

As a PFA, we are managers of funds, so we give management instructions to our pensions fund custodian on how to move the money and the instructions will be legitimate instructions because they are also aware of the instructions we should give. The system is such that it won’t be possible for there to be any fraud under the new scheme.

Even when the PFA is not properly managed and is going under, the funds of the RSA holders is safe because they are not keeping the funds of the PFAs. All the regulator needs to do is to transfer assets under management to the different PFAs. It is a very secure system”.