Refinery owners sue union over pension raid claims

Published on Tuesday 22 April 2008 22:03

THE union threatening a strike at Scotland's only oil refinery is being sued by the plant's owners over alleged defamatory statements it has made.

Unite and Ineos, the owner of Grangemouth, spent yesterday in talks aimed at averting this Sunday's action, which could cripple fuel supplies.

But in the late afternoon, with no deal in sight, the firm announced it had served legal papers on the union.

It said: "Ineos has today issued legal proceedings against Unite for inaccurate and misleading public comments it has recently made during the dispute over proposed changes to pensions.

"Unite has made public comments that Ineos has stripped 40 million from the Grangemouth pension fund. This is an extremely serious allegation and is completely untrue."

The company, which bought the site from BP, said it had asked Unite to retract the statement, but the union had refused.

It added: "We therefore have no choice but to issue court proceedings in order to protect our reputation and to establish that the allegation is untrue."

Last night, a spokeswoman for Unite said no-one could comment on the legal proceedings as they were involved in talks.

The strike, over pensions, was announced last Thursday and the sides have fought a war of words since. If they cannot resolve it, 1,200 workers will strike for two days from Sunday.

Ineos has begun shutting down the plant, and says garages will start running out of petrol by the end of the weekend.

The two sides were in talks all day at the London offices of the conciliation service Acas. The union called the strike in protest at plans to end the company's final-salary pension scheme for new workers.

Ineos said earlier it had made a number of concessions.

Tom Crotty, chief executive, said: "The proposed new scheme for existing workers will continue to be among the most generous in the country."

Ineos said it was planning to delay the introduction of contributions from the workers to the pension scheme so that these were phased in at 1 per cent a year over six years from April next year. The initial proposal was 2 per cent a year for three years.

The company said it was also improving proposals for redundancy payments.

"We believe these proposals represent a continuing, generous, final-salary arrangement which is still an extremely attractive and competitive pension arrangement when comparing pension plans," said Mr Crotty.