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.”
The filing targeted the AT&T Pension Benefit Plan, not Athene. Still, the insurer didn’t mince words after the dismissal.
“The district judge adopting the report and recommendation and dismissing all claims challenging AT&T’s pension risk transfer affirms what we have said all along: the claims asserted in these PRT industry cases are frivolous, entirely without merit, and driven by predatory trial lawyers looking for a payday at the expense of retirees,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email.
This isn’t Athene’s first courtroom clean sweep. A different federal judge earlier this year dismissed a nearly identical lawsuit against General Electric’s pension risk transfer to Athene, again ruling that beneficiaries couldn’t show actual financial injury.
For Athene, that’s two strikes against opponents of its pension deals. For retirees hoping the courts would derail them, no traction so far.
