Shekarchi Pleased Settlement will Help Members of Failed St. Joseph’s Pension Fund

House Speaker-elect K. Joseph Shekarchi expressed hope and satisfaction with a $30 million-plus settlement announced today between members of the failed St. Joseph pension plan and several of the defendants they sued for its mismanagement.

Said Speaker-elect Shekarchi (D-Dist. 23, Warwick), “Every member of the St. Joseph’s pension system is an innocent victim who trusted their employers to contribute and manage their retirement plan responsibly. They had no way to see this disaster coming, and it left thousands of people in danger of losing their contributions and their hope for a stable future. We are very glad to see progress toward restoring what was taken from them, and we are optimistic for a full, fair resolution of all the lawsuits surrounding this insolvency. We are also committed to preventing this sort of failure in the future, because employees deserve to be kept in the loop about their retirement investments.”

The Speaker-elect Shekarchi and Senate President Dominick J. Ruggerio were the sponsors of a law (2018-S 2112, 2018-H 8166) passed in 2018 to help facilitate the settlement. In 2019, they sponsored another bill (2019-S 0431Aaa, 2019-H 5287Aaa) aimed at preventing similar insolvency situations in the future. That bill, which was also enacted, now requires that any nongovernmental pension plans that are not covered by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and have 200 or more members must comply with ERISA’s reporting requirement.

The $85 million St. Joseph pension plan covers about 2,700 current and former employees of Our Lady of Fatima and Roger Williams hospitals, but was left insolvent when contributions to it ceased following the sale of Fatima and Roger Williams to Prospect Medical Holdings in 2014.