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Giving Personal Shareowners a Voice

"Giving Personal Shareowners a Voice" was the title of a meeting yesterday (3/7/2014) organised by Gavin Oldham of The Share Centre. It was organised to discuss a number of concerns about shareholder engagement with companies and the rights of individual shareholders. It was attended by a number of "stakeholders" interested in this area including representatives from the BIS, FRC, WMA, Wider Share Ownership Council, ShareAction, UKSA, ICSA, a number of journalists and myself representing ShareSoc. The first topic covered was the failure ...

Fiduciary Duty and Intermediated Securities Report – A Bombshell at the End

The Law Commission was asked to undertake a review of how the law of fiduciary duties applies to investment intermediaries and to evaluate whether the law works in the interests of end investors. This followed a recommendation in the Kay Review undertaken by Professor John Kay where he attacked the excessive "intermediation" in financial markets, the lack of clarity of responsibility, the difficulties trustees have in interpreting their duties and related factors that seemed to be undermining the ethics of financial ...

Zoopla and Rightmove – are they a cosy duopoly?

Zoopla Property Group listed on the stock market on the 18th June. It's an opportune time to review that company and its main competitor, Rightmove, because you can read the IPO prospectus of the former on the web. A prospectus always discloses more information than you will normally get although Rightmove is also quite open with information. These two companies are the gorillas in the on-line property advertising market with Rightmove being larger in size but Zoopla apparently growing more rapidly.  In ...

Pay at RBS – over 99% in favour

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) held its Annual General Meeting yesterday (the 25th June). Most of the media did not even bother to report it. There were some shareholders present who spoke against the remuneration at the company, but when it came to a vote  the proxy counts were 99.81% in favour of the Remuneration Report and 99.66% in favour of the Remuneration Policy. PIRC had also opposed the Remuneration Policy before the meeting. A summary of what they said is ...

Kentz, Victoria, AstraZeneca, and SSE

A number of companies on which ShareSoc has commented recently were in the news today (23/6/2014) or over the preceding weekend. Let's cover each in turn: Kentz Kentz received a cash offer for the company of 935p from SNC-Lavalin this morning. That's a premium of 33% to the recent share price. With such a premium and the stated support for the offer from the directors, it looks likely to succeed.  This will avoid the directors of Kentz having to deal with the ...