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Nominee Accounts

Progress at Last! Review of Intermediated Securities

As members of ShareSoc will know, our Shareholder Rights Campaign is one of our most important activities. The current difficulty of contacting shareholders whose shares are held in nominee accounts, and the difficulty many such shareholders have in voting, is a severe impediment to driving necessary change. This is a particular problem with smallcap companies. In other words, without improved shareholder rights, it is difficult for any other campaigns directed at problem companies to succeed. Less scrupulous directors know this and feel ...
Post Date: June 15, 2019 Read more

Chas Stanley Prices Crest Membership At Ridiculous Level

Charles Stanley have sent out a letter to all their customers who use Personal Crest accounts that in future they will be charged £504 per annum (inc. VAT). Although the company stopped offering the service to new customers some time ago, existing users have in some cases been paying nothing to be a Personal Crest member. They clearly want to get rid of all such users of their service, include those using the low-cost Chas Stanley Direct platform because £504 is ...
Post Date: May 19, 2019 Read more

The Unstoppable Glacier of Government’s Concerted Actions?

By Cliff Weight, Director, ShareSoc We sometimes see things changing at a glacier-like pace. But once a glacier starts moving it has huge momentum and is unstoppable. My question is: is this metaphor applicable to the way Government is behaving with regard to business? The civil servants who drive Government policy transcend the short lives of Parliament. Taking this perspective what do we see? My take on this is as follows. The Financial Crisis terrified nearly everyone. We stared into the abyss. We were ...
Post Date: March 5, 2019 Read more

Stewardship Should Reflect Views of Beneficial Owners

We, ShareSoc, think that individual investors have been disenfranchised by the nominee system and by the difficulties in getting timely copies of Annual Reports, AGM notices and voting forms. It is estimated only 6% of individual investors shares get voted, which is a disgrace. What is needed is a neat, easy to use system that makes it ultra quick and easy to vote your shares. Individuals who invest in funds have little or no control over how the shares in their funds ...
Post Date: February 11, 2019 Read more

Missing Dividends

I talked about having too much cash in my ISA and SIPP accounts in my last blog post. But in fact it’s not as much as it should be because dividends on my ISA holdings in JPMorgan Japan Smaller Companies Trust (JPS) did not arrive as expected. They should have been paid on the 7th November, and were on my direct holding on the register but not on my ISA ones. The ISA ones are held in two different ISA accounts ...
Post Date: November 22, 2018 Read more

Meeting with Link Asset Services

I recently attended a meeting with Link Asset Services who claim to be the largest UK share registrar. In addition to me there were two senior managers from Link and two ShareSoc directors (Mark Northway and Mark Bentley). ShareSoc and I do of course have a long-standing interest in ensuring shareholders can and do vote their shares at General Meetings. Other matters discussed were the problems created by nominee accounts, in the Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD), in the Central Securities Deposit ...
Post Date: October 23, 2018 Read more

IPOs, Platforms, Growth Stocks and Shareholder Rights

I agreed with FT writer Neil Collins in a previous article when discussing the prospective IPO of Aston Martin (AML) – “never buy a share in an initial public offering” he suggested because those who are selling know more about the stock than you do. We were certainly right about that company because the share price is now 24% below the IPO price. Smithson Investment Trust (SSON) did rather better on its first day of trading on Friday, moving to a 2% premium. ...
Post Date: October 21, 2018 Read more

A Bad Day in the Market, but Good News from Unilever and BEIS

It was a bad day in the market yesterday, with the FTSE All-Share falling over 1%. This seems to have been driven by a sell off in bonds. Equity prices are usually linked to bond prices simply because as bond yields rise from a fall in bond prices, it becomes more attractive to hold bonds relative to equities. That particularly applies to shares that are “bond proxies”, i.e. ones bought because of their high yields for income seeking investors. These changes have ...
Post Date: October 5, 2018 Read more

Shareholder rights, letters to MPs and questions at AGMs – An Update

Over 20 members have to my knowledge written to their MPs (as we requested) and a number of members have asked questions at AGMs. We have certainly raised the issue. The Minister (or most likely his civil servants) have produced what looks like a standard response which is being sent to those MPs who contacted Greg Clarke MP, the Secretary of State. Their response argues that the UK does not have to follow the intent of the EU Shareholder Rights Directive and ...
Post Date: August 17, 2018 Read more

Stopping Another Beaufort Case

Readers are probably aware of the administration of stockbroker Beaufort, how PwC are running up enormous bills to the disadvantage of creditors and how they also claimed to be able to charge the bills against client assets under the Special Administration Rules. See here for more information if you are not familiar with this debacle: https://www.sharesoc.org/campaigns/beaufort-client-campaign/ I hope all stock market investors have already written to their Members of Parliament on this topic, not just to get the Special Administration Rules changed ...
Post Date: August 9, 2018 Read more

Premier Foods, stock lending, custodians, shareholder rights and nominee accounts

The background to my comments is below: KATE BURGESS in the FT on 15 July 2018 reported that accusations of empty voting — where investors borrow voting shares for short periods to swing the outcome at meetings —reverberated around the market ahead of Premier Food’s shareholder meeting next week. They were sparked when Oasis Management , the Hong Kong activist hoping to unseat Premier’s chief executive Gavin Darby, said it had increased its stake in the owner of Angel Delight from 9 to ...
Post Date: July 25, 2018 Read more

Protecting Yourself Against Administrations

Investors now know that when your stockbroker goes into administration, your assets are not secure (or “ring fenced” as your contract with them often says) because they can be seized under the Special Administration Regulations by the administrator to pay their costs. This has become clear from the Beaufort case. That means many investors are facing losses because Beaufort client accounts, like most stockbroking accounts now, were nominee accounts with the shares registered in the name of Beaufort. There are two possible ...
Post Date: June 8, 2018 Read more

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