Christopher Stiles

Partner, Gowling WLG

Christopher Stiles is a partner based primarily in Birmingham who helps clients to deal with any contentious or non-contentious legal issues that may arise in relation to their pension plans with the greatest possible ease and efficiency.

Pensions can be a challenging area for employers, with pension plans that ranging from legacy arrangements that are now closed to accrual, but are still a major liability on the balance sheet, to ongoing plans that are used to reward current employees.

Christopher takes a particular interest in innovative and complex projects including asset-backed funding arrangements, liability management exercises and buy-outs.

On the trustee side, Christopher has close ongoing relationships with his trustee clients and helps them through the legal issues they face in running their pension schemes, both the day-to-day problems and larger projects including scheme mergers and wind-ups

Contributed to

3

Tax treatment of pensions—an introduction

Practice notes

This Practice Note provides an overview of the tax treatment of UK registered pension schemes (in particular regarding income tax and national insurance contributions). It summarises the main tax rules applicable to member and employer contributions, scheme assets (including investment returns on those assets) and scheme benefits paid out of the scheme. It also considers the tax treatment of UK private pension arrangements that are not registered pension schemes.

Pensions

Transfer to a DB superfund—trustee and employer considerations

Practice notes

This Practice Note focuses on the considerations applicable to trustees and employers of a defined benefit (DB) scheme when considering transferring to a DB superfund.

Pensions

Conflicts of interest policy

Precedents

This Precedent is suitable for use by the trustees (or trustee company) of an occupational pension scheme to record the arrangements put in place to manage their conflicts of interest, in accordance with the Pensions Regulator’s guidance on conflicts of interest.

Pensions