Rensburg AIM VCT Plc (RSB)

Rensburg AIM VCT Plc (RSB)

Blog posts

Rensburg AIM VCT Merger Agreed

Today (27/11/2015) shareholders in Rensburg AIM VCT (RSB) agreed to merge their company with Unicorn AIM VCT in a unanimous show of hands vote. They also agreed the tender offer which was associated with the deal and those shareholders who submitted tenders will be paid in full. Proxy votes were about 92% in favour on both resolutions. This is a definitive snub to Bill Nixon  of Maven who attempted to disrupt these plans on the basis that he could make a more ...

Rensburg AIM VCT AGM and Blinkx AGM

Did the directors postpone the Rensburg AIM VCT AGM, originally scheduled for the 22nd July, as they knew the votes? And even more importantly, what is the future for AIM VCTs? These were some of the questions that arose at the Rensburg AIM VCT AGM yesterday (on the 25th August). No answer was obtained to the first question, but there was coverage of the second question which may interest anyone who invests in VCTs. All the resolutions were passed, but all three ...

National Grid AGM, Rensburg AIM VCT and Stocktrade

I attended the National Grid Annual General Meeting in Birmingham yesterday. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to ask a question as the organisation that I was representing as a proxy put my son's name on it rather than mine so I was only allowed in as a "guest". It was not a particularly exciting event this year. Not a single shareholder complained about the outrageously high pay of the executive directors. The Chairman was both dogmatic and condescending to the mainly ...

VCT/EIS Changes and Rensburg AIM VCT

The Summer Budget announced changes to the qualifying investments for Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) and EIS investments. Some of changes and their impact were not immediately apparent but have come to light since. The rules will effectively be tightened to keep them focussed on early stage companies. For example for VCTs the investee companies will need to have been trading less than 10 years (or 7 years if they are not "knowledge intensive" businesses) and management buy-outs will be discouraged. The details ...

Defeating Shareholder Democracy at Alliance Trust et al

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 ...

Rensburg AIM VCT About Face on Wind-Up

Rensburg AIM VCT Plc have today (18/6/2015) announced that the circular giving details of the previously proposed wind-up of the company has been put on hold. They state that the previous announcements have "......acted as a catalyst to generate interest in the Company and several of the parties with whom the Board had held previous discussions have approached the Board with proposals which might prove to be more attractive than before". Maven Capital Partners, who had written to shareholders, is not ...

Rensburg AIM VCT Wind-up covered in the FT

There was an interesting article in the FTMoney edition yesterday (6/6/2015) on the proposed wind up of Rensburg AIM VCT Plc. The board of directors are pushing ahead with this proposal and a General Meeting to approve it is scheduled with the AGM on the 22nd July. The FT article by Adam Palin points out that anyone who claimed capital gains roll-over relief on their original investment in the VCT may not wish to support the wind-up. It quotes me (as a ...

Rensburg AIM VCT Wind Up

Shareholders on the register of Rensburg AIM VCT will have received a letter from Bill Nixon of Maven Capital Partners. Maven are an experienced Venture Capital Fund manager and have experience of taking over the management of existing VCTs as the letter indicates. They are proposing to take over the management of the Rensburg AIM VCT instead of the company winding up as the board of directors has proposed. The company has previously announced that they propose to formally wind up via ...

Rensburg AIM VCT to Wind Up

Four years ago ShareSoc ran a campaign to shake up the Rensburg AIM VCT which historically had given a dire investment performance and had very high management fees. These things were changed but it still has the same Chairman, Richard Battersby, and other directors. We did question at the time what the future of the company might be because the company tended to return any cash from investment realisations to shareholders thus effectively gradually winding down the size of the company. The ...

AGM Reports

Rensburg AIM VCT (RSB) AGM Report 2015

I attended the Annual General Meeting of Rensburg AIM VCT in Leeds on the 25th August. To remind readers this company has been the focus of a long running campaign by ShareSoc (since October 2011 in fact - see www.sharesoc.org/campaigns.html for the complete history). I argued that they should change the focus from being an AIM VCT to a generalist one and tackle other major issues. Although investment performance subsequently improved, and the AIM market improvement helped, they made few new ...

Rensburg AIM VCT (RSB) AGM Report 2012 – Substantial votes against the directors

On the 26th July I attended the Annual General meeting of Rensburg AIM VCT. ShareSoc has been running a campaign on this Venture Capital Trust since October 2011 (see www.sharesoc.org/campaigns.html for background information). Our main concerns when we commenced the campaign were: 1. The historic long-term poor investment performance of this company, which we have suggested is the result of a focus on AIM company investments (a negative average annual total return of minus 0.7% per annum since formation according to independent sources). We proposed a change of ...

ShareSoc News

ShareSoc Gives Voting Recommendations for Rensburg AIM VCT Annual General Meeting

PRESS RELEASE 67 4/8/2015 ShareSoc has been running a campaign on Rensburg AIM VCT since 2011. Our initial concerns were the investment performance and policy, but more recently the Directors proposed to wind-up the company. ShareSoc opposed that on the grounds that many investors, some of whom originally would have claimed capital gains roll-over relief, would be disadvantaged by such a move. Although the position of investors is affected by their personal circumstances and tax position, it seemed possible to us to ...

ShareSoc celebrates second anniversary

PRESS RELEASE 43 (01/03/2013) In February 2010 the UK Individual Shareholders Society (ShareSoc) was launched as an organisation to represent private investors. Since then the Society has recruited over 2,500 members and has actively worked to promote their interests. ShareSoc has run a number of campaigns on companies where we identified significant issues of concern to shareholders including Rensburg AIM VCT, Graphite Enterprise, Intercede Group, Lighthouse Group and BAE Systems, and achieved significant share price performance improvement in the first two. Intercede ...

ShareSoc Launches Campaign on Rensburg AIM VCT

PRESS RELEASE 12 (14/10/2011) ShareSoc (The UK Individual Shareholders Society) has launched its first campaign to obtain changes in a specific company – namely Rensburg AIM VCT. Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) have major tax advantages, and some VCTs have been very successful with total returns (net asset value plus dividends) of over 5% p.a. since launch, ignoring tax reliefs. However there are many that have been very disappointing. One of these is Rensburg AIM VCT which has achieved a total return of -1% ...