Corporate Governance

Corporate Governance News

This section on Corporate Governance provides investors with the latest topical news plus some informal comments and insights from ShareSoc’s directors and other contributors.

Alliance Trust Under Attack

Alliance Trust, an investment trust held by many private investors, is coming under attack for poor performance and poor corporate governance for a second time. It defeated a campaign by Laxey Partners back in 2011, and although their AGM resolutions were defeated the company did subsequently make some changes - for example more share buy-backs were done to help control the share price discount. This time it is the turn of Elliott Advisors who control over 12% of the shares. They ...

Olympus – A $1.7 Billion Dollar Fraud

One of the best television programmes on business matters was surely the recently broadcast documentary on the fraud at Olympus (BBC TV 4 Storyville under the title "A $1.7 Billion Dollar Fraud" - available on I-Player for the next few weeks). This was the story of Englishman Michael Woodford who was made President of Japanese public company Olympus Corporation, a large manufacturer of optical equipment (revenue $10 billion and 40,000 employees).  Although he had worked for the company for many years, he ...

Scottish Oriental Smaller Companies Trust AGM Report Summary

I attended the AGM of the Scottish Oriental Smaller Companies Trust (SST) yesterday (19/2/2015). This is an investment trust that is focussed on China, South-East Asia and India - yes there is not much Scottish about it apart from the fact that it is registered in Edinburgh and managed by First State Investment Management who are headquartered there (but whose parent is actually the Commonwealth Bank of Australia). Normally they hold their AGMs in Edinburgh but this year it was in First ...

Rolls-Royce Results and a New Director

Rolls-Royce Plc published their full year results today (13/2/2015). How does this champion of British industry and one of the FTSE mega caps (market cap £17bn) now look? Like all such large companies one could spend hours analysing the accounts because the initial "headline" data provided by the company in the announcement tends to err on the positive side. So the "highlights" are given as "Record order book of £73.7bn (that's slightly up at 3% on the prior year), underlying revenue and ...

Corporate Governance at Quindell, and news on Aero Inventory

I won't even attempt to discuss the past history of events at Quindell in this article. But recent ones suggest that it is likely to remain a controversial company. After the departure of founder and former Executive Chairman Rob Terry, Richard Rose has been appointed as Chairman and Jim Sutcliffe has been appointed as Deputy Chairman and Strategy Director. Shareholders no doubt welcomed these experienced hands to take charge of this company after past events. But there are a couple of problems ...

Naibu suspended

On Friday (9/1/2015) the shares of Chinese clothing company Naibu (NBU) were suspended  at the request of the non-executive directors "pending clarification of its trading position". The CFO had resigned on the 31st December and the trading update on the 24th November hinted the dividend might not be paid and profits reduced. The best comments on this event were probably those of Paul Scott who writes for Stockopedia. He has been consistently critical of Chinese companies listed on AIM and his words ...

A YouTube video on shareholder rights

The latest initiative in the ShareSoc campaign to improve shareholder rights is a video. In it I explain why shareholder democracy is important and how it has been totally undermined by the nominee system now in general use. Instead of you acquiring the rights of an owner of the business when you buy shares, those rights have been diverted and purloined by the nominee operator or stockbroker. This is simply wrong! That is why ShareSoc has been campaigning for change under the ...

2014 Review and New Year Resolutions

Now's the time of year to look back on the performance of the stock market in 2014, and look at plans for the future. Last year was undoubtedly a disappointing year for the UK stock market. The FTSE All-Share index was down 2.45%, worse than many other major markets. The cause was undoubtedly that the All-Share index is dominated by large mega-cap FTSE-100 companies such as BP, Shell, Glaxo and Tesco. The first two have been badly hit by the decline ...

Ignoring the UK Corporate Governance Code

Last week there were Annual General Meetings of the Baronsmead 1 and 2 VCTs (BDV and BVT) and the British Empire Securities and General Trust (BTEM) on the same day. These companies are all investment trusts although the latter is of course somewhat different in nature to the two Venture Capital Trusts. They do have one thing in common though - they both claim to be able to report against the AIC Corporate Governance Code rather than the UK Corporate Governance ...

Vanguard backing shareholder committees

According to a report in the Financial Times this morning, Vanguard is to promote the idea of "shareholder liaison committees" to improve corporate governance. This is of particular significance because Vanguard is one of the largest investment groups in the world and overtook Pimco last year to become the second largest fund manager.  Vanguard primarily runs low cost index tracker funds and therefore has to hold all major companies. Indeed they are one of the largest holders of shares in many ...

BP and Shell facing climate change resolutions

Both BP and Shell are likely to face resolutions at their next AGMs which will raise the issue of climate change. A coalition of investment groups including ShareAction and the Local Authority Pension Fund (LAPF) are looking for signatories to a requisition for a resolution to require more reporting by these companies on various aspects of their approach to carbon reduction and emissions management. See http://www.lapfforum.org/news/co-filers-sought-for-2015-shell-and-bp-agm-resolutions for more information. Comment: Some investors feel that the Annual Reports of such companies are already ...

Progress on the Kay Review

Back in 2011 the Government commissioned Prof. John Kay to review the operation of UK stock markets. There were concerns about "short-termism" by investors, poor corporate governance in companies, excessive executive pay, lack of engagement by investors with companies, high investment charges and excessive intermediation in the investment chain. The resulting report was a very good analysis of the defects in the way the market operated and the recommendations in the report for change were generally accepted by the Government. The Government ...