The Supreme Court allowed Boliden Tara Mines Limited’s appeal and granted an order rectifying the 1999 deed governing the Tara Mines Pension Plan. The amendment excludes plan members who were receiving Income Continuance Plan benefits on 20 February 1998 from the removal of the deduction known as “integration” when pensionable salary is calculated.
The Court said the appeal had been narrowed to that single request for rectification. The High Court had dismissed all of the company’s claims in a judgment delivered on 9 March 2007, with its order perfected on 14 March 2007. The Supreme Court’s judgment was delivered on 21 December 2010 by Hardiman J, with Macken and McKechnie JJ also listed.
The company’s pension arrangements treated employees receiving disability-related Income Continuance Plan benefits as active members for pension purposes, although their employment had ended. The dispute concerned whether the 1999 amendment removed integration for those beneficiaries as well as employees who were actively working on or after 20 February 1998. Integration meant deducting an amount related to the State pension when calculating pensionable salary.
Boliden Tara Mines argued that the company and Irish Pensions Trust intended the change to apply only to active employees. Evidence before the Court included affidavits from company and trustee representatives, internal memoranda, committee records and employee communications. The Supreme Court described the evidence of intention and of how the drafting error occurred as clear and unchallenged. The representative defendant did not cross-examine the company’s witnesses or provide contradictory evidence.
The Court explained that rectification is an equitable remedy used to correct a written instrument that fails to record the parties’ actual common intention. The applicable civil standard is proof on the balance of probabilities; the evidence must be convincing in light of the circumstances. It considered that standard met here and said the deed’s text went beyond the intention shared by the company and the trustee.
The order was limited to rectifying the deed in the terms claimed. The Court addressed whether the instrument accurately expressed the intentions of its parties; it did not decide a broader question about what had been agreed in industrial relations discussions involving other groups of workers or unions.