EDDIE TRUELL has raised £400m of new funding for Pension Corporation, his pension-buyout business, in a move that gives him greater firepower to make deals.

JP Morgan, the giant American bank, has joined the firm’s share register, taking up £60m of the fund-raising.

The remaining funds have come from a handful of the group’s 11 investors, which include JC Flowers, Och-Ziff, Swiss Re, HBOS, Royal Bank of Scotland and Istithmar World, an offshoot of the Dubai state.

The seed investors ploughed £900m into Pension Corporation at its creation. The latest fund-raising has been secured just weeks after Pension Corporation clinched Britain’s biggest pension buyout, securing the £1.1 billion pension scheme of former television rental business Thorn. The deal led to increased payments for 15,000 pensioners.

Pension Corporation is also understood to have reopened negotiations with the trustees of the £2.5 billion Telent pension scheme.

Truell already owns Telent, the rump company of Marconi, but has to negotiate separately with the pension trustees to acquire the pension scheme.

Previous negotiations have courted controversy with the Pension Regulator. Pension-buyout deals transfer the assets and liabilities of a pension scheme to an insurance company, which then takes over the running of it.

The concept has grown in popularity in recent years after changes in pension rules gave more power to scheme trustees. It is now much easier for trustees to insist that companies put more money into their company pension schemes to protect the benefits of pensioners.

Many companies have been frustrated by the need to account for deficits in their pension scheme on the company balance sheet.

A number of pensions scheme trustees have also been keen to do deals with insurance companies to get additional security over benefits.

Industry sources say that British pension schemes with a collective value of more than £35 billion have pitched for quotes, although only a fraction of those are expected to lead to deals.

Many other companies are looking at deals to hedge their pension liabilities without transferring the assets or administration of the scheme to a third party.

Even Hugh Osmond, the entrepreneur who owns insurance group Pearl, is understood to have asked some of his rivals to offer quotes for a buyout of the company’s £1.5 billion staff pension scheme. It is understood that the scheme is well-funded, meaning it would not require much additional capital to remove the risks from Pearl’s balance sheet.

Quotes for the Pearl scheme come in spite of the fact that Osmond has offered to buy other companies’ pension schemes in the recent past.

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