Angela Dean, Greg Meekings, Iain Pears

Angela Dean, chairman of the Pension Review Group, gave a briefing to pensioners and members of the Reuter Society on the state of negotiations with the Thomson Reuters group. After outlining progress achieved on administrative issues, she said the Review Group had been engaged in a “war of attrition” with management over the restoration of discretionary annual increases linked to UK inflation. She recalled that that there had been increases in only three of the past ten years. “We hope that our persistent lobbying will culminate in an agreement that will be acceptable to everyone,” she said.

Greg Meekings, chairman of the Trustees of both Reuters Pension Fund and the smaller Supplementary Pension Scheme, then briefed the meeting further. His remarks were embargoed, not for publication, pending an announcement expected shortly.

The meeting, attended by over 60 people, was held at St Bride’s Hall under the auspices of the Reuter Society. It was followed by a regular quarterly meeting of the Society at which the speaker was Iain Pears, author and art historian, who worked for Reuters editorial from 1982 to 1990, including assignments to France, Italy and the US. He left Reuters to follow his wife’s academic career in America.

Pears described how he wrote his first novel in an isolated log cabin in West Massachusetts. “I had nothing else to do,” he said. Drawing on research for his Oxford university studies in art history and conversations in Rome with the Carabinieri Art Theft Squad, he created the first of a series of successful detective stories set in the international art world. ■