Daily Mail, 29 Aug 2020, The Hut Group under fire over £4.5bn listing

Cliff Weight, ShareSoc director writes:

I am quoted in the Daily Mail today questioning the corporate governance of The Hut: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8675511/The-Hut-Group-fire-4-5bn-listing.html

Cliff Weight, director of small investors’ campaign group ShareSoc, said: ‘This is awful corporate governance and I personally would be very wary.

‘Share classes that give one type of shareholder more powers than another devalue the secondary class and are therefore undesirable.

‘And a ‘founder’s share’ which gives an individual exceptional powers is completely contrary to good corporate governance. Such rights seriously damage board effectiveness and the rights of other shareholders, knowing that they can be overruled at the whim of one individual.’

I won’t buy shares in them, they fail to give shareholder rights to all shareholders.

It was also great to be quoted alongside Minerva, the global governance experts.

JP Morgan were amongst the advisers who gave their blessing to this crappy governance. JP Morgan were also the advisers to Sirius Minerals and we all know what a disaster that turned out to be for shareholders.