A federal judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York shut down a lawsuit against General Electric Co. over its pension risk transfer with Athene Holding, saying the retirees who filed the case couldn’t show they lost money.
The deal, struck in December 2020, moved $1.7 bn in pension obligations tied to 70,000 former workers.
Judge Glenn Suddaby of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed the complaint on Sept. 24, 2024. His opinion said the plaintiffs failed to prove the Athene arrangement reduced the actual monetary value of their benefits.
They also argued GE’s pension plan botched fiduciary duties by picking Athene, but the court wasn’t buying it. Standing, the judge wrote, requires an injury. And no injury was evident. Case dismissed, without prejudice.
Athene, which wasn’t even named in the suit, responded with sharp language. The insurer said the ruling proved its point: that pension risk transfer litigation is driven by lawyers fishing for fees.
A company spokesperson, in an email, called the cases “frivolous” and “without merit.” According to our analysts, that framing mirrors what most insurers have argued whenever these challenges land in court.
The GE case joins a growing list. Verizon became a target in late 2024 when beneficiaries filed a class-action suit over its $5.9 bn transfer.
- That case tagged Verizon, its pension plan, and fiduciary State Street Global Advisors Trust as defendants, but skipped Prudential Financial and Reinsurance Group of America, the insurers behind the annuities.
- Two more lawsuits surfaced the same year. Both hit Athene. One tied to a $2 bn deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., the other linked to AT&T’s $8 bn transfer.
- Plaintiffs in each argued similar themes: questionable fiduciary process, uncertain impact on benefit security, lack of transparency. None of those claims have settled into clear precedent yet.
PRT transactions keep scaling in size. But litigation around them – sometimes loud, sometimes thin- shows no sign of fading.
Athene Holding Ltd. chalked up another courtroom win after a Massachusetts federal judge threw out a lawsuit from AT&T retirees targeting the company’s $8bn pension risk transfer.
U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton signed off on a report from another judge who concluded the plaintiffs never proved harm or breach of fiduciary duty.
In his Sept. 30 ruling, Gorton wrote the retirees failed to show that a prudent fiduciary could not have acted as AT&T did, and with that, dismissed the case outright.
The dispute goes back to March 2024, when a group of former AT&T workers filed suit in federal court.
Their argument: the 2023 transfer stripped value from their pensions because benefits moved from a plan regulated under ERISA to Athene, an insurer owned by private equity and flagged by plaintiffs as operating a “highly risky offshore structure.”
