Come rain or shine, a slew of investment advisers, consultants, bookkeepers and law firms charge Gannett big bucks for helping run the company's pension plan. And in 2008 -- the most recent year available -- there was a lot of rain, newly released public documents show.The value of the Gannett Retirement Plan's assets fell 34%, to $1.6 billion from $2.4 billion in 2007, as the overall stock market plunged amid the credit crisis, according to its latest annual report to the U.S. Labor Department. I obtained a copy yesterday under the federal Freedom of Information Act. Still, the plan's performance was better than the 41% decline in the broader market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, according to Google Finance.
The plan benefited 55,423 participants in 2008, a number that has surely fallen since, after thousands of layoffs and other job cuts.
But it certainly benefited those advisers; they collected a combined $13.1 million in fees, the documents show. Here's the list:
Earlier: Documents reveal your Social Security numbers[Image: that's a ticker tape machine]
There are some interesting names on that list of advisers; I'll be writing more about them later.
ReplyDeleteThe backstory on some of these companies:
ReplyDelete* Brandes Investment Partners is one of Gannett's biggest stockholders.
* Nixon Peabody is a law firm that's done work for Gannett practically since the dawn of time.
* Hewitt Associates manages customer service for Gannett's 401(k) plan (and gets roundly criticized on this blog for doing a poor job).
* Ernst & Young is a huge accounting firm that audits the pension plan's books, plus those of Gannett itself.
* The oddly named Excelleratehro does bookkeeping; it's a subsidiary of computer giant Hewlett-Packard.
* Kushner Chupack is an accounting firm whose work on the plan is described simply as "admin," according to the report.
All that advising money spent, and I believe this was one of the years the company contibuted nothing to the pension accounts, other than the collectivley bargained ones and the ones in the UK.
ReplyDelete