THE Pensions Regulator will amend its rules so that companies attempting to sell their final salary fund must alert the watchdog, just days after Marconi said it wanted to offload its its £2.4 billion scheme.

David Norgrove, chairman of the Pensions Regulator, said yesterday that he was reviewing the rules on notifiable events to ensure he was kept informed of developments in the growing market for final salary schemes.

But Mr Norgrove said that he would not hinder the deals as long as they benefited scheme members. “If companies that are well-equipped financially want to come in and take on British final salary schemes, then that’s a good thing and we wouldn’t want to get in their way,” he said. “There are certainly people interested in coming into the UK market because of the amount of money involved and it’d be good to see a market open up.”

The Times revealed on Tuesday that Marconi had appointed Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, to help dispose of its pension scheme following the £1.2 billion sale of the British telecoms equipment maker to Ericsson, the Swedish group.

During the acquisition Marconi’s liabilities to 38,000 pensioners and 30,000 deferred scheme members were hived off into a smaller company, called Telent, while Ericsson bought most of the remaining business. The British company was also forced to put £185 million of the purchase price into the scheme and set aside £490 million in case extra cash injections were needed.

Mr Norgrove yesterday hit back at criticism that he had not taken shareholders into consideration when negotiating the Marconi deal. “It is a huge amount of money to go into a scheme but the sale meant that we were going to have a company with 2,000 employees supporting more than 60,000 pension scheme members,” he said.

The regulator revealed that it was investigating 17 companies it believed had purposely attempted to avoid their pensions liabilities. As yet, no contribution notices forcing the companies to prop up their funds have been issued, Mr Norgrove said, but lawyers were reviewing the situation.

David Sonter, a corporate partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the law firm, said yesterday that it took about two weeks for the regulator to clear private equity transactions that involved restructuring a company’s pension fund. “Pensions issues are now some of the most important issues for private equity in any acquisition or exit,” Mr Sonter said.