Shareholder Rights Being Eroded

This blog gives you the latest topical news plus some informal comments on them from ShareSoc’s directors and other contributors. These are the personal comments of the authors and not necessarily the considered views of ShareSoc. The writers may hold shares in the companies mentioned. You can add your own comments on the blog posts, but note that ShareSoc reserves the right to remove or edit comments where they are inappropriate or defamatory.

There is a good article in the Financial Times today (Saturday 22/6/2019) which is headlined “UK shareholder rights being eroded”. As the article says, almost no investors who buy shares legally own the shares they have bought, which rather surprises them. That’s because most of them buy via nominee accounts operated by stockbrokers and platforms. Not only that, but most nominee accounts are “pooled” accounts so even identifying who are the “beneficial owners” is not always easy.

Does it matter? Yes it does as investors apparently holding shares via Beaufort Securities soon found out, and there have been a number of similar cases. If brokers go bust or cease trading, your investments will be frozen and reclaiming them may not be easy. It also undermines your rights to vote, to attend AGMs and other rights that those on the share register of the company have as “Members”.

The Law Commission has announced a review of this system – see here for more details: https://tinyurl.com/yyhm3mf9 .

There are some good quotations from Cliff Weight of ShareSoc and Peter Parry of UKSA in the FT article. However there is this quote from Russ Mould of AJ Bell: “It is debatable whether this [nominee account system] makes it harder for shareholders to cast their votes any more than the old paper share certificate regime”. That is clearly wrong as those on the register can easily vote via submitting a paper proxy form or via the registrars’ on-line systems. Submitting votes if you are in a nominee account is rarely so simple and AJ Bell do not provide an easy to use method so it would require significant effort by investors to vote. The result is that most do not bother.

The other claim in the article is that the nominee account system has made trading easier and cheaper. That is not true either. The electronic Personal Crest system is a better alternative and as all trades go through Crest anyway (even those done via a nominee account), there is no cost difference in reality. The reason brokers and platforms have promoted nominee accounts is simply because there are other commercial advantages for them.

There is a lot more information on this subject which explains the real facts and includes a video from me on the subject on the ShareSoc web site here: https://www.sharesoc.org/campaigns/shareholder-rights-campaign/

A minimal if partial solution to this problem would be to have all beneficial owners on the share register. But in reality the whole system needs reforming so that investors are not forced into nominee accounts where they lose a lot of their legal rights, and shareholder democracy is fatally undermined.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

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