Extracts from a legal complaint filed 24 Jan 2020 in the US courts
Shell Oil Company accused of breach of fiduciary duties in respect of Shell Provident Fund 401(k) Plan with $10.5 billion in assets and 36,898 participants. It is one of the largest defined contribution plans in the United States. Plans of such great size are commonly referred to as “jumbo plans” or “mega plans”.
3. The marketplace for retirement plan services is established and competitive. Multi-billion-dollar-defined contribution plans, like the Plan, have tremendous bargaining power to obtain high-quality, low-cost administrative, managed account, and investment management services. But instead of using the Plan’s bargaining power to benefit participants and beneficiaries, Shell Defendants allowed unreasonable expenses to be charged to participants for administration of the Plan and managed account services, failed to even monitor numerous funds in the Plan at all, and retained poorly performing investments that similarly situated fiduciaries removed from their plans.