Standard Life UK Smaller Companies and FRC Meetings

Yesterday I attended two meetings in the City of London. Here are brief reports on each.

Standard Life UK Smaller Companies Trust Plc (SLS) held a meeting for investors to “meet the manager” in London as their AGM was in Edinburgh this year – only about 10 people attended the latter so there were more in London. I have held this trust for some years and the manager, Harry Nimmo, who has been with the company for 33 years has been a consistently good performer. The management company has recently merged with Aberdeen and is now called Aberdeen Standard Investments but apparently there have been no significant changes internally as yet. Mr Nimmo’s comments are summarised below.

He said they have a discount control policy which is unique to UK smaller companies trusts. They buy back shares if the discount gets about 8%. The investment policy is unchanged and they are not keen on blue-sky or concept stocks. AIM is now a better place than 5 years ago as it is now more broadly based and no longer dominated by mining stocks and blue sky tech stocks.

They have put a new debt facility in place which will ultimately replace their CULS (Convertible Unsecured Loan Stock). The final date for conversion is coming up and investors need to pay attention to that as they are “well in the money”.

The trust shows a ten year CAGR dividend growth of 23.7% and the capital return since 2003 is 851% (plus dividends of course). But there have been some bear markets during his management which one needs to allow for as investors. However, if you had sold the trust after the Brexit vote you would have made a terrible mistake – the company is up 54% since June 2016.

The trust looks for companies that can grow irrespective of the economic cycle, and those with good cash flow and strong balance sheets. Mr Nimmo covered their investment process which is somewhat formulaic using a screening process (I have covered it in past articles) but they do meet investee companies twice a year. They have about 50 holdings in the fund which is a “bottom-up” stock selection actively managed fund.

He mentioned they have 10% in animal care and still hold NMC although as it is now a FTSE-100 stock they have been selling out. They still have a large holding in Abcam and have bought RWS recently. Their second largest holding is First Derivatives where most profits come from outside the UK. They generally do not hold oil/gas/mining stocks and are very light on real-estate [note: I agree with the former and many of my individual holdings overlap with the trusts but I do hold some real estate companies]. An exception though is Workspace who recently produced an excellent set of results with a rapid growth in dividends.

They have also been selling Fevertree as it exceeded 5% of their portfolio value.

FRC Meeting

I did not manage to stay until the Q&A session as I had to go to a meeting organised jointly by ShareSoc and UKSA with the Financial Reporting Council (FRC). This was a long meeting and I hope one or other organisations will produce a lengthier report on it because it was an exceedingly useful meeting. I will simply highlight a few points of particular interest.

The FRC is responsible for audit policy, standard setting and audit quality including investigation and enforcement of past transgressions. So it is a rather important body for those private investors who have come unstuck on an investment because the accounts of the company turned out to be misleading – for example the recent debacle at Carillion was mentioned by one attendee, but I can think of numerous other examples.

The speakers covered the role of audits, both currently and how they might develop in the future (partly as a result of technology changes such as the use of data analytics). After Brexit it is likely there will be a broadly equivalent regime as investors are opposed to “unpicking”.

The FRC reviews about 150 audits every year and grades them into four categories (the reviews are listed on the FRC web site). By 2019 they want 90% to be in the top two ratings which they are not at present. It was noted that KPMG come out worse of the big audit firms. A common reason for audits falling short are lack of professional scepticism.

The FRC also undertakes thematic reviews of particular issues. I raised the issue of the lack of common standards for “adjusted” data commonly reported by companies (such as earnings, or return on capital that I mentioned in previous recent blog posts). The response was it was mandated to explain the definitions of such adjustments but I pointed out this did not help with comparability (e.g. of broker forecasts). The FRC said they will be consulting on this issue shortly, which is good news.

The role of the FRC in “enforcement” was covered. They stressed that their remit does not cover crime, they merely regulate accountants and actuaries although it is of course true that the failure of auditors to identify false accounts is one area they often investigate. It was mentioned that the size of the team on this had grown from 11 people in 2013 to 30 now and they are still looking for more bodies. This really just shows how under-resourced the FRC has been in the past. A total budget of £15m per year was mentioned. Comment: this seems hopelessly inadequate to me bearing in mind the number of public companies (and other organisations) and the number of auditors they have to monitor. It explains partly why complaints to the FRC often seem to disappear into a black hole, or why investigations often take so long as to be pointless. A list of cases under formal investigation is on the FRC web site (See here for that and two linked pages for the full list: https://www.frc.org.uk/auditors/enforcement-division/current-cases-accountancy-scheme which of course will tell you that Globo was commenced in December 2015 and Quindell in August 2015 and have yet to report).

I did suggest to the speaker that the FRC should be a party to the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime (as some audit failures involve the crime of fraud) as the Police, the SFO and FCA are, and which has improved their disclosure culture. This might assist those who report failings to get some feedback on the progress of a case. But the FRC argue that their role is not to investigate crime as such and they are inhibited by legislation/regulation on what they can disclose. But it is very clear to me that too often complaints get made, but the complainants are not advised of progress and often have no idea on the outcome. This is an issue they will be looking at.

They hope the extra staffing will speed up investigations. The investigation process was discussed, but for example, Carillion had not even been placed under formal investigation as yet. It was suggested by audience members that the FRC was quite ineffective but recent cases such as AssetCo and Healthcare Locums were mentioned as demonstrating strong action and they have issued fines of £12 million in the last year which is the biggest ever. It was mentioned that fines go to the Treasury which is not ideal.

Confusion between the different regulatory bodies (e.g. the FRC, FCA, SFO, etc) was mentioned by attendees and the speakers, not helped by similar three letter acronyms. One attendee suggested that a unified regulatory body would help (such as the SEC in the USA). Comment: I agree at present it is unclear except to experts on who is responsible for what and the accountability of these bodies to the Government or to any democratic body of investors.

The FRC also has an interest in the UK Corporate Governance Code and the Stewardship Code. A consultation on a new Corporate Governance Code is imminent. There was also a session on the role of the Financial Reporting Lab where both ShareSoc and UKSA members have been involved in the past.

I’ll have to stop here because the budget speech by the Chancellor will commence soon and I wish to listen to it as there may be some major changes on investment tax reliefs. I’ll do another blog post later on it.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )