Video transcript: Pensions and Restructuring Lawyers Event 2023 - Introduction

Transcript

Atul del Tasso-Dhupelia: Hello everyone, it's really good to see so many of you online. We've been hosting this event every few years for the past seventeen years which is quite something. I can see lots of our lawyer friends and contacts not only from London but also from across the whole of the UK, so thank you and you're all very welcome. I am Atul Del-Tasso Dhupelia. I'm a partner in our pensions and restructuring team, we advise a wide range of corporate, trustee and investor clients on various pension and restructuring matters. So we had this event the last time two years ago and a lot has happened since then. This is when we usually make a joke about how many pension ministers we've had since our last event and I can make the same joke about how many prime ministers we've had this time too. It's quite a remarkable political landscape we're in at the moment and we're going to hear more about this in our first session. But more broadly over the past two years there was a record transactions market, we as a team have been extremely busy advising pension clients on various M&A deals. The market has also seen some distress, maybe not as much as some commentators were expecting but we've still been busy with a number of distressed situations many of which have had pension schemes. And all of this has been happening in a post Pension Schemes Act 2021 world, which if you remember the last time we came together the act had just come out and we were debating.

And it's been really good since then working with many of you to advise clients on this legislation and practice. We've also seen pension schemes grappling with the LDI fallout and an evolution in the pension endgame market and how pension schemes should be investing and running-off in the longer term. We are advising more and more clients at the moment in this space and expect this to really shape a lot of the future. And of course at a macro level interest rates and inflation are at completely different levels to where they were two years ago, which clearly has huge implications for both pensions and restructuring. Now in all of the work we do in this space, we really cannot do it without working alongside all of you in the legal community. We hugely value and enjoy collaborating with pension and restructuring lawyers in all the work we do, which is why this event is so important to us and we really, really appreciate you joining.