IMI Pension Fund

IMI Pension Fund

The IMI Pension Fund was established in 1970 by the UK industrial engineering group IMI plc as the primary retirement vehicle for its domestic workforce. For four decades, it accumulated assets against defined-benefit promises until the sponsoring employer closed the scheme to future accrual in 2010, capping liability growth. The fund was subsequently partitioned into the IMI 2014 Deferred Fund and the IMI 2014 Pensioner Fund, each with segregated assets and a distinct liability profile aligned to its membership cohort. Since the partition, the trustee board — chaired by Greg Croydon and operating through the corporate trustee IMI Pensions Trust Limited — has pursued a deliberate endgame strategy centered on de-risking. The primary deployment pathway has been the purchase of bulk annuity policies from UK-regulated insurers, transferring both investment risk and longevity exposure off the fund's balance sheet. Alongside these insurance buy-ins and buyouts, the scheme retains residual property holdings, including mixed-use real estate in the United Kingdom, which are being managed for orderly disposal. The strategic posture is purely defensive: no new fund commitments, no venture or private equity programs, and no active search for alpha. The fund's governance is split between the corporate trustee and the sponsoring employer's senior leadership. Roy Twite, CEO of IMI plc, and Luke Grant, CFO, both hold formal roles connected to the scheme's oversight, ensuring alignment between the industrial parent's balance-sheet priorities and the pension vehicle's winding-down trajectory. IMI plc, a FTSE 250 constituent specializing in fluid control and motion technologies, retains ultimate responsibility for any residual shortfall not covered by the annuity arrangements, though the disclosed posture suggests the buyout process is well advanced. The fund has no separate investment team; all strategic decisions route through the trustee board with actuarial and legal advisors guiding each annuity tranche negotiation. What distinguishes the IMI Pension Fund structurally is its status as a post-accrual scheme actively executing a buyout completion plan — it is not a going-concern asset pool but a liability-matching entity in terminal mode. The binary split into deferred and pensioner sub-funds reflects a bespoke UK statutory framework that allows each cohort to achieve buyout pricing independently, a technique that can capture better insurer terms than a single commingled transaction. This dual-track wind-down makes the fund a reference case for mid-cap UK defined-benefit schemes navigating the Pension Regulator's endgame guidance.