As reported, the UK-based pensions administrator last month temporarily stopped taking new applications and asked HMRC to take its name off the list while it resolved what founder and managing director Martin Cadman said at the time was “a technical issue”.
MC Trustees had been one of the first two companies to launch a QROP scheme in Malta after HMRC recognised the country as a jurisdiction to which UK pensions could be transferred in 2009.
In a statement released over the weekend, a spokeswoman for MC Trustees said the company had been informed “at the beginning of November” that it had been given the go-ahead to return to trading as usual, and that it had returned to the HMRC list on 19 Nov.
The company never said what the “technical issue” involved, but industry sources said it was thought to have been to do with a question over the taxation of pensions benefits.
Last month, Joseph Bannister, chairman of the Malta Financial Services Authority, stressed that there had been “nothing wrong, nothing untoward” with the MC Trustees’ QROP scheme beyond a technical issue that needed to be resolved, and that another company, Blevins Franks, had done the same thing with its Maltese QROPS.
The MC Trustees’ MCT Malta Private Retirement Scheme was approved by the MFSA in March, 2010, along with the Melita International Retirement Scheme Trust, administered out of Malta by an arm of Malta-based Custom House Global Fund Services Ltd.
In August 2010, Ascentric became the first UK wrap service to put a QROPS on its platform, with the addition of the MCT scheme.
Malta currently has nine QROP schemes on the HMRC list, which may be viewed by clicking here.
