Regulations and Law

The Case of the Disappearing Shares

Another example of the wonders of pooled nominee accounts has come to my attention. When you buy shares through a stockbroker, you expect to receive them. Indeed settlement should now take place in 2 days if traded electronically as most now are. So if you are using a stockbroker's nominee account they should appear in that account in that period. You will see them on your account so they will be there will they not? The answer is not necessarily! Take the ...

ShareSoc Deplores Withdrawal of Personal Crest Membership by Brokers

ShareSoc has issued the following Press Release: Following the takeover of Stocktrade by Alliance Trust Savings (ATS), the latter have decided to withdraw support for Personal Crest Membership from their clients. Clients will either have to transfer into the ATS nominee service, turn their holdings into paper share certificates (a truly archaic form nowadays which are soon to be outlawed by an EU Directive), move to another broker or liquidate their holdings. This continues a recent trend for stockbrokers to terminate the ...

Undisclosed Fees and AGMs

It's interesting what you can learn at Annual General Meetings, or from ShareSoc reports on them, even if you don't attend in person. One of the recent news items in the financial press was about the disclosure of what private equity fund managers have received in "carried interest". It transpired that two very large US pension funds, Calpers and Calstrs, had no idea how much their fund managers had earned in this way over many years on top of their normal fees. ...

FT Acquisition, Toshiba, Diageo, Healthcare Locums, False Accounting, Chinese Companies, and AIM

The Financial Times is being sold by Pearson to Japanese media group Nikkei Group. The Chairman of Nikkei was quoted as saying it will be "business as usual" (in the FT of course) and that the "philosophy and values of the FT are the same as ours". Clearly they are still in the honeymoon period but let us hope that is true as the FT provides excellent factual news and commentary in general. Here's just some of the news they have ...

VCT/EIS Changes and Rensburg AIM VCT

The Summer Budget announced changes to the qualifying investments for Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) and EIS investments. Some of changes and their impact were not immediately apparent but have come to light since. The rules will effectively be tightened to keep them focussed on early stage companies. For example for VCTs the investee companies will need to have been trading less than 10 years (or 7 years if they are not "knowledge intensive" businesses) and management buy-outs will be discouraged. The details ...

Defeating Shareholder Democracy at Alliance Trust et al

The existing shareholding arrangements in public companies, with many investors in nominee accounts, now effectively frustrate shareholder democracy. Alternatively they make it either very difficult in practice, or enormously expensive. Let's look at a couple of examples where ShareSoc has some recent experience of requesting share registers - Alliance Trust and Rensburg AIM VCT. In terms of the size of the company and numbers of shareholders Alliance Trust is one of the larger public companies. It has recently come under attack from ...

Enormous Costs of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Legal Action

There was an interesting article by Geoff Ho in the Sunday Express yesterday (31/5/2015) on the law suit being pursued by shareholders against RBS. He reports that the RBoS Shareholders Action Group was presented with a bill for £1.2 million by its former solicitors Bird & Bird and a demand for "prompt payment" after they changed lawyers to Fladgate following concerns over costs and communication. Indeed the original demand was even higher but was subsequently reduced.  Fladgate are working on a ...

Chinese AIM Companies – Sorbic et al

A good letter in the Financial Times today (29/5/2015) from Sorbic investor John Gunn about how AIM rules have failed to protect shareholders. He said it is "a terrible state of affairs" and suggested the AIM regulations had failed completely to protect shareholders. Sorbic International (SORB) is an AIM listed Chinese company which has encountered major governance and legal problems and its shares have been suspended. To quote from the latest RNS, after the board fired Mr Wang Yan Ting, the CEO: "Since ...

Custodian Reit – It always pays to ask

A note from Mark Bentley: I have been a shareholder in the Custodian REIT (AIM:CREI) since its original flotation in March 2014. It has “done what it says on the tin”, investing in numerous small sized, high yielding commercial properties, to generate income, resulting in an attractive and growing dividend stream for investors. Given the low level of target gearing (25% of NAV), this is a low-risk strategy I find attractive, in this era of negligible interest rates. In January 2015 the ...

A Dream Become a Nightmare – And a Plug for ShareSoc

There was a good article in the Daily Telegraph on Sunday (17/5/2015) explaining how Thatcher's dream of a share owning population has become a nightmare. She tried to create a nation of investors by privatisations and regulatory changes to improve business competition but instead many companies have ended up being sold to foreign buyers. Even worse there has been a collapse in private share ownership. The reported proportion of UK shares held by individuals has collapsed from 20% in 1994 to 11% ...