Law Commission Publishes Scoping Paper Re Nominees, etc

The Law Commission have this morning published their scoping paper following their Review of Intermediated Securities. Here are the links

Executive Summary (16 pages)

Scoping Paper (201 pages)

ShareSoc welcome the Law Commission report which clearly highlights the inadequacies of the current system. For far too long the rights of individual shareholders have been ignored. It looks like progress is about to be made.

UKSA have commented ‘Having looked more closely at both reports, they represent an excellent piece of work by the Law Commission. They deal with all the key issues in a clear, thorough and even-handed way. We’ll hope that BEIS devotes appropriate time and resource to taking this forward’.

The disenfranchisement of individual investors, via the nominee system, has been a huge problem and rectifying this is a key part of our Shareholder Rights Campaign. Any changes will take years to implement. ShareSoc and UKSA will continue to monitor the situation and lobby for change.

I remain of the view that investors should own shares not nominees, but the Law Commission appears not to be favouring this option at present. Hargreaves Lansdown Platform failures (see FT report on 11 Nov) would be less of a problem if investors could sell their shares with other brokers, but they cannot. The Law Commission Scoping Paper on Intermediated Securities should have given this issue more weight.

Cliff Weight, ShareSoc Director

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