Jeffrey Beck, Liquidating Tr. of the Estates of Crown Vantage, Inc. v. Pace Int'l Union, 05–1448.

• Citation: 551 U.S. 96,75 BNA USLW 4399,127 S.Ct. 2310,168 L.Ed.2d 1
• Decision Date: 11 June 2007
• Docket Number: No. 05–1448.,05–1448.
• Parties: Jeffrey BECK, liquidating trustee of the Estates of Crown Vantage, Inc. and Crown Paper Company, Petitioner, v. PACE INTERNATIONAL UNION et al.
• Court: United States Supreme Court

551 U.S. 96

127 S.Ct. 2310

168 L.Ed.2d 1

75 BNA USLW 4399

Jeffrey BECK, liquidating trustee of the Estates of Crown Vantage, Inc. and Crown Paper Company, Petitioner,

v.PACE INTERNATIONAL UNION et al.

No. 05–1448.

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued April 24, 2007.

Decided June 11, 2007.

Syllabus^*

Respondent PACE International Union represented employees covered by single-employer defined-benefit pension plans sponsored and administered by Crown, which had filed for bankruptcy. Crown rejected the union's proposal to terminate the plans by merging them with the union's own multiemployer plan, opting instead for a standard termination through the purchase of annuities, which would allow Crown to retain a $5 million reversion after satisfying its obligations to plan participants and beneficiaries. The union and respondent plan participants (hereinafter, collectively, PACE) filed an adversary action in the Bankruptcy Court, alleging that Crown's directors had breached their fiduciary duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), 29 U.S.C. § 1001 et seq., by neglecting to give diligent consideration to PACE's merger proposal. The court ruled for PACE, and petitioner bankruptcy trustee appealed to the District Court, which affirmed in relevant part, as did the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit acknowledged that the decision to terminate a pension plan is a business decision not subject to ERISA's fiduciary obligations, but reasoned that the implementation of a termination decision is fiduciary in nature. It then determined that merger was a permissible termination method and that Crown therefore had a fiduciary obligation to consider PACE's merger proposal seriously, which it had failed to do.

Held: Crown did not breach its fiduciary obligations in failing to consider PACE's merger proposal because merger is not a permissible form of plan termination under ERISA. Section 1341(b)(3)(A) provides: “In ... any final distribution of assets pursuant to ... standard termination ..., the plan administrator shall ... (i) purchase irrevocable commitments from an insurer to provide all benefit liabilities under the plan, or ... (ii) in accordance with the provisions of the plan and any applicable regulations, otherwise fully provide all benefit liabilities under the plan.” The parties agree that clause (i) refers to the purchase of annuities, and that clause (ii) allows for lump-sum distributions. These are by far the most common distribution methods. To decide that merger is also a permissible method, the Court would have to disagree with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the entity administering the federal insurance program that protects plan benefits, which takes the position that § 1341(b)(3)(A) does not permit merger as a method of termination because merger is an alternative to (rather than an example of) plan termination. The Court has traditionally deferred to the PBGC when interpreting ERISA. Here, the Court believes that the PBGC's policy is based upon a construction of the statute that is permissible, and indeed the more plausible.

PACE argues that § 1341(b)(3)(A)(ii)'s residual provision referring to an asset distribution that “ otherwise fully provide[s] all benefit liabilities under the plan” covers merger because annuities (covered by § 1341(b)(3)(A)(i)) are an example of a permissible means of “provid[ing] ... benefit liabilities,” and merger is the legal equivalent of annuitization. Even assuming that PACE is right about the meaning of the word “otherwise,” the clarity necessary to disregard the PBGC's considered views is lacking for three reasons. First, terminating a plan through purchase of annuities formally severs ERISA's applicability to plan assets and employer obligations, whereas merging the Crown plans into PACE's multiemployer plan would result in the former plans' assets remaining within ERISA's purview, where they could be used to satisfy the benefit liabilities of the multiemployer plan's other participants and beneficiaries. Second, although ERISA expressly allows the employer to (under certain circumstances) recoup surplus funds in a standard termination, § 1344(d)(1), (3), as Crown sought to do here, merger would preclude the receipt of such funds by reason of § 1103(c), which prohibits employers from misappropriating plan assets for their own benefit. Third, merger is nowhere mentioned in § 1341, but is instead dealt with in an entirely different set of statutory sections setting forth entirely different rules and procedures, §§ 1058, 1411, and 1412. PACE's argument that the procedural differences could be reconciled by requiring a plan sponsor intending to use merger as a termination method to follow the rules for both merger and termination is condemned by the confusion it would engender and by the fact that it has no apparent basis in ERISA. Even from a policy standpoint, the PBGC's construction of the statute is eminently reasonable because termination by merger could have detrimental consequences for the participants and beneficiaries of a single-employer plan, as well as for plan sponsors. Pp. 2315 – 2321.

427 F.3d 668, reversed and remanded.

SCALIA, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.

M. Miller Baker, Washington, D.C., for the petitioner.

Matthew D. Roberts, for the United States as amicus curiae, by special leave of the Court, supporting the petitioner.

Julia P. Clark, for respondents.

Rory K. Little, San Francisco, CA, Wilber H. Boies, Michael T. Graham, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Chicago, IL, David E. Rogers, M. Miller Baker, Counsel of Record, Michael S. Nadel, Jeffrey W. Mikoni, McDermott Will & Emery LLP, Washington, D.C., Counsel for Petitioner Jeffrey H. Beck.

Christian L. Raisner, Weinberg, Roger & Rosenfeld, Alameda, CA, Julia Penny Clark, Counsel of Record, Laurence Gold, Douglas L. Greenfield, Leon Dayan, Kathleen M. Keller, Bredhoff & Kaiser, PLLC, Washington, D.C., Counsel for Respondents.

Justice SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court.

We decide in this case whether an employer that sponsors and administers a single-employer defined-benefit pension plan has a fiduciary obligation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), 88 Stat. 829, as amended, 29 U.S.C. § 1001 et seq., to consider a merger with a multiemployer plan as a method of terminating the plan.

I

Crown Paper and its parent entity, Crown Vantage (the two hereinafter referred to in the singular as Crown), employed 2,600 persons in seven paper mills. PACE International Union, a respondent here, represented employees covered by 17 of Crown's defined-benefit pension plans. A defined-benefit plan, “as its name implies, is one where the employee, upon retirement, is entitled to a fixed periodic payment.” Commissioner v. Keystone Consol. Industries, Inc., 508 U.S. 152, 154, 113 S.Ct. 2006, 124 L.Ed.2d 71 (1993). In such a plan, the employer generally shoulders the investment risk. It is the employer who must make up for any deficits, but also the employer who enjoys the fruits (whether in the form of lower plan contributions or sometimes a reversion of assets) if plan investments perform beyond expectations. See Hughes Aircraft Co. v. Jacobson, 525 U.S. 432, 439–440, 119 S.Ct. 755, 142 L.Ed.2d 881 (1999). In this case, Crown served as both plan sponsor and plan administrator.

In March 2000, Crown filed for bankruptcy and proceeded to liquidate its assets. ERISA allows employers to terminate their pension plans voluntarily, see Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation v. LTV Corp., 496 U.S. 633, 638, 110 S.Ct. 2668, 110 L.Ed.2d 579 (1990), and in the summer of 2001, Crown began to consider a “standard termination,” a condition of which is that the terminated plans have sufficient assets to cover benefit liabilities. § 1341(b)(1)(D); id., at 638–639, 110 S.Ct. 2668. Crown focused in particular on the possibility of a standard termination through purchase of annuities, one statutorily specified method of plan termination. See § 1341(b)(3)(A)(i). PACE, however, had ideas of its own. It interjected itself into Crown's termination discussions and proposed that, rather than buy annuities, Crown instead merge the plans covering PACE union members with the PACE Industrial Union Management Pension Fund (PIUMPF), a multiemployer or “Taft–Hartley” plan. See § 1002(37). Under the terms of the PACE-proposed agreement, Crown would be required to convey all plan assets to PIUMPF; PIUMPF would assume all plan liabilities.

Crown took PACE's merger offer under advisement. As it reviewed annuitization bids, however, it discovered that it had overfunded certain of its pension plans, so that purchasing annuities would allow it to retain a projected $5 million reversion for its creditors after satisfying its obligations to plan participants and beneficiaries. See § 1344(d)(1) (providing for reversion upon plan termination where certain conditions are met). Under PACE's merger proposal, by contrast, the $5 million would go to PIUMPF. What is more, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which administers an insurance program to protect plan benefits, agreed to withdraw the proofs of claim it had filed against Crown in the bankruptcy proceedings if Crown went ahead with an annuity purchase. Crown had evidently heard enough. It consolidated 12 of its pension plans ¹ into a single plan, and terminated that plan through the purchase of an $84 million annuity. That annuity fully satisfied Crown's obligations to plan participants and beneficiaries and allowed Crown to reap the $5 million reversion in surplus funds.

PACE and two plan participants, also respondents here (we will refer to all respondents collectively as PACE), thereafter filed an adversary action against Crown in the Bankruptcy Court, alleging that Crown's directors had breached their fiduciary duties under ERISA by neglecting to give diligent consideration to PACE's merger...