ANP
NOS News••Amended
Edith Schippers is leaving as chairman of the DSM pension fund. She is not running for a new term, writes the trade magazine PensioenPro.
Schippers is said to have already taken this decision in the autumn due to changes in her work. As CEO of the chemical group, she will have to deal with the upcoming merger of DSM with the Swiss company Firmenich.
In addition, she is going back into politics, as a party leader for the VVD in the Senate. “This presidency takes a lot of time and energy and I want to do it well,” says Schippers. Her term as chairman of the pension fund will expire in May of this year.
Pensioenpot
Last week wrote NRC that Schippers withheld an internal document from which it appears that the company itself would be responsible for a significant fall in the funding ratio of the pension fund. According to the newspaper, DSM needed money for innovations and that was achieved, among other things, by temporarily putting less money into the pension pot.
The company speaks of one internal analysis of public data. DSM says it does not recognize itself in the picture that NRC paints.
NRC writes that the benefits for pensioners have not or hardly been adjusted for inflation for fifteen years due to the money problems. For many former employees, it was especially painful that their pensions did not increase, but former CEO Feike Sijbesma received an extra deposit of more than 2 million euros in his pension pot.
Former manager Marius Weehuizen tells PensioenPro that the pension fund has “consciously and systematically eroded”. The management would have deliberately misrepresented the situation. For him, the note is proof of that. According to Weehuizen, the fund itself has given falling interest rates and aging as causes for the decreased funding ratio.
