U.K. Pension Plan Tops Kodak Creditor List

Eastman Kodak Co., which sought bankruptcy protection last week, has disclosed its top 50 unsecured creditors. Kodak’s underfunded U.K. pension plan tops the list. While the 132-year-old corporate icon kept its foreign affiliates out of Chapter 11 in 2007, it guaranteed payments that its U.K. subsidiary is required to make to its pension plan.

Kodak’s U.S. plans covering 63,000 employees are “reasonably well funded,” according to the government’s pension insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. But Kodak is on the hook to its foreign plans for $1.2 billion. The U.K. plan, with some 15,000 members, had a shortfall of £576.5 million ($897.2 million). Last year, Kodak pledged some $800 million over the next decade to shore up the U.K. plan.

In the U.S., the PBGC typically receives an unsecured claim for the shortfall in a plan. But the U.K. Pensions Regulator has recently taken a more aggressive approach in U.S. bankruptcies—including those of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.—arguing it deserves priority over other unsecured creditors.

Whether U.K. authorities plan a similar legal offensive in Kodak’s case is unclear. The trustee for Kodak’s U.K. pensions and a spokeswoman for the Pensions Regulator couldn’t be reached for comment.