At least 5 million South Africans are owed in excess of R85 billion of pension funds and other policies. File image. Picture: Karen Sandison/African News Agency(ANA)
AN EASTERN Cape woman is believed to be among at least 5 million South Africans owed in excess of R85 billion of pension funds and other policies, believed to be sitting with major financial institutions, unclaimed since the 1990s.
Klara Blaauw, 63, from Uitenhage was contributing to now-defunct SA Hella Pension Fund, which was administered by Glenrand MIB Benefit Services. Glenrand was liquidated in 2011.
Hella is among hundreds of pension funds that were deregistered by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) after failing to indicate to liquidators by November 2011 whether or not it still existed. Hella left many employees in complete darkness when it stopped operating around 1996.
Blaauw believed that prior to being cancelled, Hella was under Momentum Metropolitan Life’s administration, “but neither Metropolitan Life nor the FSCA has records of what happened to the assets”. Metropolitan denied having taken over the administration of Hella.
Glenrand MIB Benefit Services said it deregistered the Hella Pension Fund in 2013 “with no assets”.
During the desperate search for her money, Blaauw has been threatened with court interdicts. One institution, which Blaauw named, told her to make an inquiry via her broker.
“But I have no clue who my broker is and my previous employer ceased to exist a long time ago,” she said.
Blaauw’s family, whose members are all unemployed, survive on her old-age government grant.
BenX Services Portal chief executive Sean Rossouw said the more than R85bn, which dates back to 1995, included more than R42bn worth of pension funds owed to retired private-sector workers. This excludes the Government Employees Pension Fund.
He said part of the R85bn was R10bn owed from the Guardian Fund, managed by the Department of Justice, while the rest was from unpaid life cover, funeral insurance and dormant bank accounts.
From the early 1990s to date, more than 13 pension and provident funds were deregistered and transferred to various umbrella funds after employers found it expensive to run them as stand-alone funds.
“If you have not claimed within three years, you lose the right to that money. If you owed somebody money and the person whom you owe money does not try to claim it within three years … he or she loses the right to claim the money from you,” said Rossouw.
He said that although Hella was deregistered, it could not simply close down until all the funds have been transferred somewhere.
“The money may have gone to an unclaimed fund held by big administrators to be kept as unclaimed benefit funds. So the Hella pension funds would have been deregistered and if there is any unclaimed money it would have been transferred to an unclaimed benefit fund or the Guardian Fund.”
In November 2011, the FSCA issued a list of pension funds that were administered by Glenrand, and asked them to contact Mervyn I Swartz & Associates within 60 days.
The FSCA had warned at the time that if Swartz “is unable to establish the existence of the listed funds within a period of 60 days, the fund records … will be destroyed by the liquidator”.
In 2012, the FSCA issued another statement with a list of pension funds that had been deemed inactive, and Hella was among them.
The FSCA said it had interacted with Blaauw’s son Mallory for the past three years regarding his and his mother’s benefits.
“We checked our records and found that Hella Pension Fund transferred to Wesco Group Pension Fund during 1993. Subsequently Wesco Group Pension Funds’ name changed to Toyota SA Pension Fund during 1999.”
The FSCA also contacted Alexander Forbes and NMG to verify if they had member records for Blaauw, but both companies wrote back indicating that they couldn’t find any records for the member.
| Investigations Unit