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It is this weekend – ShareSoc will be at the UK’s biggest shares show UK Investor on April 21 – will you? Free tickets on offer

This Saturday 21st April ShareSoc will be mixing with more than 3,000 serious investors at the UK Investor Show. And we have some of the last available tickets to hand out today, for free, to ShareSoc members Sharesoc will be organising one of 133 stands at the country's largest one day event for those interested in shares. The other stands will be manned by AIM and Standard List companies and the CEOs of most of them will also be doing 20 minute ...

Lack of Transparency at the FRC

The Financial Times ran an interesting article on Friday (13/4/2018) headlined “FRC criticised over transparency". It reported that the Financial Reporting Council answered only 6 out of 52 Freedom of Information requests since 2013. Atul Shah, Professor of Accounting at the University of Suffolk, was reported as saying: “This shows that there is a real problem within the soul of the FRC. It is a public regulator and not a private members’ club, and it has clear duties of transparency, accountability ...

Conviviality Fire Sale

Conviviality (CVR) has now gone into administration, and the ordinary shares are probably worthless (they were suspended some days ago and are likely to remain so). The administrators have already sold the major parts of the business in “pre-pack” administration deals. That’s where arrangements are made to dispose of assets in advance of the appointment of administrators by the prospective administrators before they have in fact been appointed. Is that legal you may ask? Yes it is because of a past ...

Link Asset Services

I have complained before about the services from the registrar Link Asset Services that frustrate shareholders from receiving a paper Annual Report and Proxy Voting Form. The latest example is on another company where Link sent a paper copy of the Annual Report out, and a Notice of the AGM, but no paper proxy voting form. They suggest in a covering letter that I can either vote on-line using their “share portal” or request a paper proxy form. For those of us who ...

Integrity and independence in the judiciary and the financial services industry: a comparative study

My thanks go to ShareSoc member Tony Johnson - for bringing to my attention, a recent lecture given to the Banking Standards Board by Sir Geoffrey  Vos, Chancellor of the High Court of England and Wales. In the lecture, Sir Geoffrey considers the present state of integrity of our financial institutions and our judiciary.  For those with plenty of time, you can read the full script of his lecture here -  https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/chc-speech-banking-standards-board-lecture.pdf For those with less time, I summarise below :   Sir Geoffrey is well-qualified ...