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Investment Association Tackles Executive Remuneration

The Investment Association represents institutional investors. Last week (on 26/7/2016) their Executive Remuneration Working Group issued ten recommendations for how to "rebuild trust in pay". They claim to have consulted 360 investors, asset owners and company employees before producing their final report. One of their objectives is to simplify pay structures while improving the alignment of the interests of directors with those of shareholders. It is widely acknowledged that the pay of directors of public companies has got out of hand and ...

The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism – BHS and National Grid

The extraction by Sir Philip Green of £300m from BHS, which led to the business going into decline and leaving the company pension scheme under-funded before he sold it for a £1 to an unqualified chancer was strongly criticised by a select committee of the House of Commons yesterday. To quote from their report: "The tragedy is that those who have lost out are the ordinary employees and pensioners. This is the unacceptable face of capitalism". This echoes the comments of Ted ...

NewRiver Retail (NRR) Reconstruction and Complex Pay Scheme

NewRiver Retail announced before their AGM on the 12th July that they were going to change their domicile from Guernsey to the UK. This will assist with their move...

British Land (BLND) AGM Report

It was a hot day in London yesterday for the British Land AGM, but shareholders stayed cool in the meeting despite the share price being way down from last year. This is a only a very brief summary of the full report I have written for ShareSoc members and just covers the interesting aspects so far as investing in commercial property is concerned. First a bit of background. British Land is a FTSE-100 company REIT with assets of £9,619 million. It's a ...

Bonds, Insider Trading and New Business Secretary

The risks inherent in open-ended property funds have received a lot of media coverage of late - see my blog post of the 5th July which simply said they should be avoided. With many such funds closing so that investors could not take their money out, the risks inherent in providing liquidity to investors when the underlying assets (namely buildings) are highly illiquid have become apparent. Paul Killik had an article published in Saturday's FTMoney (16/7/2016) that made some highly intelligent comments ...