The Halcrow Trust Distribution
The Halcrow Trust Distribution
Six months after the Halcrow Trust sold their shares in Halcrow Holdings Ltd to CH2M Hill last November, the proceeds of this sale were distributed to selected beneficiaries of the Trust. Due to the veil of secrecy maintained by the Trust trustees, we have been unable to establish the ‘defined’ class of Halcrow staff who benefitted from the sale. However, the defined class appears to be based on the description relayed in March by the Trust Administrator i.e. “all employees on the payroll at 31 October 2011 with a minimum of twelve months service at that date, and employees who left Halcrow to go directly into retirement in the period between 5 November 1990 (the date of the formation of the Trust) and 1 November 2011, and were identified by the Trustees in advance of the distribution, will be included in the distribution”.
These classes are far short of the inclusive intent of the Settlers and less than the categories set out in the Trust Deeds. For example, they exclude: staff who moved to other employment during the eligibility period; wives who left employment with Halcrow during the eligibility period to join the Halcrow husbands on, say, overseas assignments; and widows and widowers of Halcrow employees who worked with Halcrow during the eligibility period. Evidence of the first two categories of exclusion was available from within the HPA membership and examination of some individual circumstances suggest that blanket exclusions to be grossly unfair. With regard to the exclusions of widows and widowers, following discussion and on the advice of Malcolm Fletcher (one of the Settlers), we established the third category of exclusion by finding two ‘eligible’ widows who haven’t benefitted. One of the widows doesn’t want her name mentioned at this stage and continues to hold on to the belief “We will be OK, Halcrow will look after us”. The other widow is Sue Marsden whose husband John Marsden died in 2010 shortly after his retirement and after many years of meritorious service with Halcrow, much of the time overseas under extremely arduous and exposed conditions.
We brought the case of the two widows to the attention of John Theakston, the Chairman of the Halcrow Trust in July, hoping that the Trustees would reconsider and had keep some funds back to deal with such eventualities. His refusal to reconsider was predictable but nevertheless was very depressing. In his letter he pointed out that: as the Halcrow Trust was a discretionary trust, no member of the defined beneficiaries had the right to receive any distribution; and the Trustees had considered all possible classes as set out in the Trust Deeds and had taken extensive professional advice during the decision making process.
No doubt that the Trustees were in a difficult situation and they would have been open to criticism whatever they decided. However, this omission is hard to understand, as the inclusion of a relatively small number of widows and widowers would not have made a big difference relative to the large amounts of individual payments. Certainly, all of us would have expected Halcrow to look after our nearest and dearest in the event of our early demise, and will be very disappointed by the injustice perpetrated against those least able to protect themselves and, possibly, in the most disadvantageous circumstance.
We hope that those of you who received a payment enjoy your windfall and are not too dismayed by the chunk taken off for Employers NI and tax. You may like to consider minimising these ‘losses’ by offsetting the cost of Employers NI against tax; and avoiding excessive taxation by investing in a pension contribution scheme.