Britannia Life fined over pensions sales

BRITANNIA LIFE, the insurer owned by Britannia Building Society, was yesterday fined pounds 500,000 by the Personal Investment Authority, the frontline regulator, for a catalogue of failures connected with the pensions mis-selling review. The company was also ordered to pay pounds 15,000 costs.

The fine against Britannia, the fourth-largest ever levied in connection with the pension transfer scandal, follows a visit by a PIA monitoring team. It found the insurer initially failed to spot 677 clients to whom mailings about the pension review should have been sent. A further 554 investors, who were on separate records kept by the building society, were not identified.

In addition, 664 investors who asked for a review of their pensions were wrongly categorised as ineligible. Meanwhile, Britannia's compliance team only started its first internal audit of the review process in February 1998, four years after it started.