Citgo Petroleum Retirees Advance Challenge to Pension Calculation

Citgo Petroleum Corp. must face a proposed class action claiming it shortchanges the pensions of certain married retirees by calculating their benefits using outdated lifespan data, according to a Chicago federal court ruling issued Tuesday.

Citgo retirees Leslie Urlaub and Mark Pellegrini are moving forward with claims that the pensions they received from Citgo, which include post-death benefits for their surviving spouses, aren’t the “actuarial equivalent” of a traditional, single-life pension as required by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Citgo argued that the statute doesn’t expressly prohibit employers from using unreasonable lifespan data when making these calculations, but the ...