The gambling group Rank has sold its pension scheme, transferring it to the US investment bank Goldman Sachs.
The sale of the scheme, which has 19,000 members and assets worth £700m, is the biggest such deal yet in the UK.
Rank has shrunk dramatically in the past few years and once employed 100,000 staff in various industries.
It said it wanted to avoid the potential risk of running a scheme whose assets were greater than its own stock market value.
"Rank is much smaller than it used to be, and the pension plan and the sum of the liabilities are far in excess of the size of the company," said a Rank director Dan Waugh.
Final salary
Rank now concentrates on casinos, bingo halls and online betting with about 19,000 staff.
"We believe that their model will provide a high level of security for scheme benefits"
Only 600 of them, mainly in its casinos, are still contributing to the final salary scheme.
From now on they will have to pay into the stakeholder version that was set up when Rank closed its final salary scheme to new joiners in 2001.
Many of the deferred and retired members of the scheme being sold are former employees of companies that have also been sold off in the past few years.
Among them have been Odeon cinemas, Pinewood film studios, the Butlins and Haven holiday camps, and the Rank film processing business.
With the scheme now fully paid up as a result of the deal, responsibility for its future financial health depends entirely on Goldman Sachs, which has set up an insurance company called Rothesay to run it.
"Rothesay Life's proposal meets all our objectives," said Mike Samuel, chairman of the Rank pension scheme trustees.
"We believe that their model, backed by Goldman Sach's strength and financial expertise, will provide a high level of security for scheme benefits and also an excellent administrative service for the 19,000 members."
More deals
The market for buying up and managing pension schemes that employers want to offload is small but growing.
The actuarial firm Mercers, which advised on the Rank deal, said private final salary pension schemes have assets of about £1,000bn, but in the past year the value of assets bought and sold in this way were just £3bn.
However, more companies are expected to push through such transactions soon.
Other firms that have already done so are Emap, Lasmo, Weir and P&O.
However, all this can be controversial.
Last year, the Pensions Regulator stepped in at the former Marconi pension scheme - now called Telent.
It appointed new independent trustees to stop the new owner of Telent, the Pension Corporation, from getting its hands on funds amounting to nearly half a billion pounds which previously had been set aside for the pension scheme's benefit.
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