The U.S. Department of Labor has brought a case against Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. and R.B. Pamplin Corporation for jeopardizing millions of dollars in retirement investments.
The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and was tabled as a direct breach of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERIA). From 2019, the plan unlawfully gained more than 20 company-owned properties, but at the cost of the pension plans.
“Dr. Pamplin must restore the pension plan to where it would be if not for his wrongdoing and make his employees’ pension plan whole,” said Regional Solicitor Marc Pilotin in San Francisco. “The Solicitor’s Office has already been engaged actively with Dr. Pamplin to determine how he will do so and the department will not relent in fighting for participants’ rights until he does.”
The court report stated that the vital pension funds were flippantly jeopardized due to the recklessness of the unlawful acquisition of company-owned real estate by the R.B. Pamplin Corporation and Subsidiaries Pension Plan.
Pensions put in jeopardy by R.B. Pamplin Corporation
“Dr. Pamplin and R.B. Pamplin Corporation sold real estate to the company pension plan to raise cash for Pamplin’s struggling company, in direct violation of their fiduciary duty of loyalty to plan participants,” said EBSA Regional Director Klaus Placke in San Francisco.
The court report stated:
“Within the six years preceding the filing of this Complaint, Dr. Pamplin and the R.B. Pamplin Corporation engaged in nearly a hundred transactions involving over twenty-five real properties by selling or contributing real property to the Pension Plan and leasing them back to R.B. Pamplin Corporation or its affiliates. In total, Dr. Pamplin and R.B. Pamplin Corporation caused the Pension Plan to acquire and hold over 50 percent of its assets as employer real property.”
The company’s properties include rangeland, a vineyard, an island in a river once used for dredging, an office building, and irrigated cropland. The Labor Department also alleges that some properties were not sold at a fair market value. Some even had “attached liens, unpaid leases, unpaid property taxes, and environmental liabilities or were sold in fractional interests, diminishing their value.”
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