A New Shareholder Organisation to Represent Individual Investors in the UK

The “UK Individual Shareholders Society”, or “ShareSoc”, has been formed to represent individual shareholders (i.e. private investors, rather than institutions). The reasons for doing this are as follows:

1. There are millions of private shareholders in the UK. They are not adequately represented at present and as a result they have little influence, while other organisations across Europe have tens of thousands of members.
2. We need an active body to campaign for the rights of shareholders and to represent their views forcefully to companies, to the Government, and to other institutions.
3. We shall be organised in a new way, with professional rather than amateur management, and we shall be properly financed. Initially we shall be involved mainly with issues which affect direct shareholders.

Our main objectives are to improve the investment performance of members, and to increase their wealth, to promote financial education at all levels, to provide a good communications facility for investors and to ensure good corporate governance in companies. We will report on companies, particularly those where problems have arisen, and are likely to support shareholder action groups where appropriate.

The new Chairman of ShareSoc, Roger Lawson, had this to say: “It is clear from recent proposals to scrap the printing of Annual Reports by the FRC, and to ban all “execution only” trading by the European Commission, that we are still seeing ridiculous proposals being put forward by public bodies. They have little understanding of what individual shareholders want and constantly bow to the prejudices of institutional investors and the interests of other stakeholders in financial markets”.

ShareSoc is offering free membership to anyone with an interest in stock market investment. It costs nothing to join and to start to receive our newsletters.

Persons may register on-line (without obligation) at our web site at www.sharesoc.org which already contains a good summary of what we intend to offer members (but please bear in mind that the web site is still under development).