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Bradford & Bingley & Northern Rock Bond Tenders

Bradford & Bingley Plc have announced a new tender offer for the subordinated bonds. These are what were formerly called PIBS which were issued before the company converted to a bank. These bonds remained outstanding when the company was nationalised in 2008 and have continued to be listed and tradable. But the previous tender offers were not considered very generous, although the market price has been slowly recovering on the expectation that the mortgage assets of the company would exceed its ...

Tesco Legal Action – or should we just “put our hands up”?

Law firm Stewarts Law has announced that it is preparing a case against Tesco based on the losses of investors in the company from the overstatement of profits. To quote from their announcement: "The Claim will allege that directors and senior management knew or were reckless as to whether Tesco's statements to the market were untrue or misleading and/or dishonestly concealed the true position, in breach of the Financial Services and Markets Act". They don't intend to await the results of ...

BG Group EGM on pay award to new CEO

BG Group - A personal view by ShareSoc director, Mark Bentley BG Group will be holding an EGM on 15th December to consider a resolution to approve a “Conditional Share Award” for newly appointed CEO Helge Lund. Details can be found here: http://www.bg-group.com/assets/files/cms/2014Meeting_ShareholderCircular.pdf Mr Lund’s appointment was announced on 15 October 2014, taking effect from 2 March 2015. He has served as CEO of Statoil, the Norwegian oil and gas company, since August 2004. Prior to Statoil, Mr Lund was the CEO of ...

British Empire – moving the goalposts?

Last year ShareSoc published an extensive report on the Annual General Meeting of British Empire Securities and General Trust. This is a long established investment trust which in the long term has achieved good performance figures, but in recent years has not been doing so well. Indeed our report suggested shareholders were becoming restless bearing in mind the comments of some investors at the AGM. For example, in the year to the 30th September 2013, the Trust achieved a total return of ...

Alpha Pyrenees Trust

Two years Alpha Pyrenees Trust Ltd, a property company registered in Guernsey but listed on the London Stock Exchange, appeared to be an attractive investment. It seemed a good opportunity to invest in a European commercial property company that could take advantage of the commercial property sector upturn within Europe. The company has a portfolio of industrial properties mainly in France and with a small percentage being located in Spain. In December 2012 the share price was 16p and the Net Asset ...