The existing shareholding arrangements in public companies, with many investors in nominee accounts, now effectively frustrate shareholder democracy. Alternatively they make it either very difficult in practice, or enormously expensive. Let's look at a couple of examples where ShareSoc has some recent experience of requesting share registers - Alliance Trust and Rensburg AIM VCT.
In terms of the size of the company and numbers of shareholders Alliance Trust is one of the larger public companies. It has recently come under attack from ...