Policy and Campaigns – Progress Update to 12 October 2021

Since June 14 (see https://www.sharesoc.org/sharesoc-news/policy-and-campaigns-progress-update-14-june-2021/  for previous update), ShareSoc’s Policy and Campaigns’ team have worked on:

 

  1. Woodford Campaign: Leigh Day have submitted their claim. They now have 11,000 claimants and another 3,000 registered, but yet to sign their Leigh Day agreement. We held a very successful webinar on 30 Sept with 942 registrants.

ShareSoc’s Woodford Campaign now has over 1,500 members, which enables us to lobby strongly for regulatory change and to hold to account those who have done wrong.

  1. Voting Guidance and Shareholder Engagement: We continue to test our new ideas with a pilot study of FTSE30 companies. This is a major exercise and reports have been published for c20 companies. The latest were for Tesco, Diageo and BHP. See https://www.sharesoc.org/category/vci/ for more info.
  2. Consultation responses. This has been another major area of work. We submitted responses to:
      1. SVS/ITI: we continue to provide a Support Group to help those who assets were with SVS which went into administration and were transferred to ITI.
      2. FCA: Mark Northway and Cliff Weight met the FCA Chair to discuss various of our concerns on 27 July. We have also held constructive meetings with the Primary Market team and the fund regulatory team.
      3. FRC, BEIS, etc.: We also meet regularly with FRC, BEIS and other key influencers. Our next meeting with the FRC is on 26 October.
      4. Law Commission Review of Intermediated Securities: We continue to await the next BEIS response to the Law Commission Review of Intermediated Securities, which inter alia is about nominee accounts and the disenfranchisement of individual investors. We have emailed BEIS, and Hargreaves and interactive, re NatWest virtual meeting and unhelpful platforms who would pass event info to investors.
      5. Bacanora Lithium: We are providing support to the Bacanora Investors Group, Think BIG, (500 members with 8% of the shares) and ShareSoc Patron Lord Lee tabled a PQ about the national interest of this takeover.
      6. Sirius Minerals Shareholder Group, Sirius Claim Group: We continue to evaluate the possibility of a claim.

           

            Cliff Weight, Director, ShareSoc

             

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