Company News

ShareSoc Welcomes BG Group Decision but calls on Sir John Hood to Resign

ShareSoc is delighted by today’s news that BG Group has decided to withdraw the conditional share award that was proposed for new CEO Helge Lund. This is a good illustration of active shareholders being able to influence corporate policy and restrain abuses. However, today’s announcement, including acceptance by Mr Lund of the revised terms, clearly demonstrates that the original proposal was excessive and unwarranted. It is obvious that insufficient consultation with shareholders had been conducted before the proposed package was announced, as ...

Bradford & Bingley & Northern Rock Bond Tenders

Bradford & Bingley Plc have announced a new tender offer for the subordinated bonds. These are what were formerly called PIBS which were issued before the company converted to a bank. These bonds remained outstanding when the company was nationalised in 2008 and have continued to be listed and tradable. But the previous tender offers were not considered very generous, although the market price has been slowly recovering on the expectation that the mortgage assets of the company would exceed its ...

Tesco Legal Action – or should we just “put our hands up”?

Law firm Stewarts Law has announced that it is preparing a case against Tesco based on the losses of investors in the company from the overstatement of profits. To quote from their announcement: "The Claim will allege that directors and senior management knew or were reckless as to whether Tesco's statements to the market were untrue or misleading and/or dishonestly concealed the true position, in breach of the Financial Services and Markets Act". They don't intend to await the results of ...

British Empire – moving the goalposts?

Last year ShareSoc published an extensive report on the Annual General Meeting of British Empire Securities and General Trust. This is a long established investment trust which in the long term has achieved good performance figures, but in recent years has not been doing so well. Indeed our report suggested shareholders were becoming restless bearing in mind the comments of some investors at the AGM. For example, in the year to the 30th September 2013, the Trust achieved a total return of ...

Alpha Pyrenees Trust

Two years Alpha Pyrenees Trust Ltd, a property company registered in Guernsey but listed on the London Stock Exchange, appeared to be an attractive investment. It seemed a good opportunity to invest in a European commercial property company that could take advantage of the commercial property sector upturn within Europe. The company has a portfolio of industrial properties mainly in France and with a small percentage being located in Spain. In December 2012 the share price was 16p and the Net Asset ...

Optimal Payments, Quindell and equity loans

A major controversy has arisen over the use by directors of loans from companies such as Equities First Holdings (EFH) which are secured against their equity stakes. The latest company to be affected is Optimal Payments (OPAY) who presented at a recent ShareSoc seminar. The share price fell substantially after comments from a well known blogger, and declined as much as 22% on the 14th November after the comments were widely circulated on bulletin boards. A number of other public company directors ...

Legal Action on Lloyds-TSB and HBOS merger

Attention all former Lloyds-TSB shareholders. As former Lloyds-TSB shareholders are no doubt well aware, the merger of Lloyds-TSB with HBOS in January 2009 to form the Lloyds Banking Group was a disaster for shareholders in Lloyds-TSB. Lloyds-TSB was a financially strong bank who historically had paid a high dividend. HBOS was obviously in financial difficulties at the time and needed bailing out. Indeed information that subsequently became public suggest it was in reality about to go bust because of its large exposure ...

Glaxo Q3 results – in need of more treatment

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) issued its 3rd Quarter Results today (22 Oct 2014). It's one of those large FTSE-100 stocks that it's difficult to avoid holding if you are a UK stock market investor. It's such a large constituent of the index that all those index funds, and indeed almost all generalist unit or investment trusts, are likely to have a big stake in them. It's also one of those stocks that many people hold directly (as does this writer) simply as a ...

The Vote at Electra Private Equity

Electra Private Equity have fought off an attack from Sherborne Investors Management. The latter wanted a change of directors and for the company to conduct a strategic review, but resolutions to remove three directors were defeated with over 61% of the votes cast against them. The interesting aspect of this event was that over 81% of the votes in issue were actually voted. There was considerable debate last week at the meeting ShareSoc held on shareholder rights about the difficulty of getting ...

A Tale of Two Trusts – SLS and BRWM

Yesterday Blackrock World Mining (BRWM) announced they were writing off their investment in London Mining. This was one of their largest holdings and cut the trust's net asset value by almost 8%. The share price promptly fell by 8% on the day and fell further today. Who are London Mining you may ask? This is a small iron ore mining company based in Sierra Leone which has been badly affected by the slump in iron ore prices and the Ebola crisis ...