Intermediated Securities

Flint Interim Report: A Betrayal?

Background ShareSoc’s Shareholder Rights Campaign has been one of our longest running and most important campaigns. The reason it is so important is that current deficiencies in the rights of beneficial shareholders severely hamper our ability, and that of shareholder action groups generally, to hold company managements to account. This impacts the effectiveness of many of our other campaigns. Visit the campaign page for further details and further explanation of the issues. Since we launched the campaign in 2014, we have made considerable ...
Post Date: August 16, 2023 Read more

Law Commission Review of Intermediated Securities

The Law Commission has published a “scoping paper” on Intermediated Securities (See Reference 1 below). This might sound a pretty dry technical subject but the subtitle of the report asks the important question – it covers “Who Owns Your Shares?” I have written about the problem of the growth in the use of nominee accounts as on-line platforms have replaced share certificates many times in the past. ShareSoc has a web page with voluminous information on this subject including reports written by ...
Post Date: November 16, 2020 Read more

Law Commission Error on Segregated Accounts

In a previous blog post on the Law Commission’s consultation on Intermediated Securities I queried their claim that all investors in nominee accounts had the option to use a...
Post Date: November 1, 2019 Read more

Fiduciary Duty and Intermediated Securities Report – A Bombshell at the End

The Law Commission was asked to undertake a review of how the law of fiduciary duties applies to investment intermediaries and to evaluate whether the law works in the interests of end investors. This followed a recommendation in the Kay Review undertaken by Professor John Kay where he attacked the excessive "intermediation" in financial markets, the lack of clarity of responsibility, the difficulties trustees have in interpreting their duties and related factors that seemed to be undermining the ethics of financial ...
Post Date: July 1, 2014 Read more