The new body will also seek to promote “the general efficiency and proper professional conduct of retirement practitioners and retirement schemes under their management,” according to its foundation statute.
The Malta Association of Retirement Scheme Practitioners, or MARSP as it is being called, was formally unveiled this morning in Malta by its co-founders, Matthew Brincat and David Erhardt, along with some of its members.
Brincat is a senior associate with the insurance and pensions department of Ganado & Associates, a Maltese law firm, while Erhardt is pensions director at Gibraltar-based STM Fidecs, a trust company and pensions administrator that last year launched a Maltese operation, STM Malta Trust & Company Management Ltd, which subsequently introduced a Malta-domiciled qualifying regulated overseas pension scheme (QROPS).
Others involved in MARSP include Bethell Codrington, managing director of London-based Panthera International, which markets a Maltese QROPS scheme for Custom House Global Funds Services, who is the association’s deputy chairman, and Michael Pace Balzan, finance and operations director for Malta-based advisers Blevins Franks, who is MARSP’s treasurer.
The new association will be based temporarily out of Ganado’s offices in Valletta, and headed up by Brincat, as secretary-general, and Erhardt, chairman. The two met when Erhardt retained Brincat’s firm to help STM Fidecs set up its Malta QROP scheme last year, Erhardt said.
“We were talking, and we agreed that it made sense to have an association for retirement scheme administrators in Malta, even though it is early days for the industry here, rather than waiting until something were to go wrong. This way we will all be singing from the same hymn sheet,” Erhardt said.
Earhardt is a former chairman of Gibraltar’s Association of Pension Fund Administrators. This role ended some months ago after STM Fidecs became the first, and thus far only, Gibraltar firm to figure out a way to structure a QROPS that manages to be acceptable to both Gibraltar’s Income Tax Commissioner and HM Revenue & Customs.
Until the new STM Fidecs scheme was launched in April, all UK pension transfers to Gibraltar had been voluntarily suspended by trust administrators there since September 2009, following concerns that clients could face possible tax penalties as a result of HMRC’s alleged concern that Gibraltar’s 0% tax on the pension income of residents over age 60 was inconsistent with the UK’s regulations.
Erhardt said STM Fidecs – which is a division of Isle of Man-based, AIM-listed STM Group Plc – is increasingly shifting its operations to Malta from Gibraltar, as it believes Malta is more interested in catering for the pension administrations industry, even though it has not had one until recently.
At present there are just seven Malta-registered or licensed retirement scheme administrators (RSAs), all of which are members of MARSP, according to Brincat. Two additional MARSP members are in the process of seeking RSA licensing from the Malta Financial Services Authority, he added.
