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Simplifying your life – expensively

In the New Year edition of the Hargreaves Lansdown newsletter, founder Peter Hargreaves leads off with this comment: "I am in a quandary. I can't work out whether life just becomes more complicated the older you get, or whether successive legislation and regulation that has happened in abundance during the last 15 years is increasingly making life intolerable. I rather suspect both are root causes of life's complications". I have had similar concerns of late. Having gone through some major technological upgrades ...

A Christmas present for the kids, and goodwill from Avocet directors

The Government has announced that it will allow Child Trust Funds to be transferred to Junior ISAs. The investment returns and charges on Child Trust Funds compare poorly with those available in ISAs so this is a welcome move. The only reservation is that it may not be possible to implement this until April 2015.Avocet Mining, a gold mining and exploration company, have also got into the spirit of the season by announcing that the fees paid to the Chairman and ...

Fiduciary Duty Consultation – no major changes proposed

The Law Commission is running a public consultation on the "Fiduciary Duties of Investment Intermediaries". This was prompted by a recommendation in the Kay Review that examined the issue of "short-termism" in business and investment decisions. It suggested that this area should be examined. One question posed was whether the legal concept of "fiduciary duty" should be extended so that investment intermediaries had clearer moral responsibilities to their clients.For example, trustees of pension funds have a general legal obligation to act ...

Whitewash at British Smaller Companies VCT

British Smaller Companies VCT has called a General Meeting to approve resolutions to rectify past accounting errors that resulted in technically illegal payments of dividends and share buy-backs back in 2006-2008. In essence the company did not have the reserves required. So these "whitewash" resolutions as they are called ask shareholders to waive any claims against the directors for these errors, and claims against shareholders who received the dividends when they should not have. This follows similar whitewash resolutions that were ...

BAE Systems – Typhoon deal shot down, and credit extended

There was bad news from BAE Systems yesterday - issued after close of trading which is always a negative sign. Firstly the prospective deal to sell Typhoons to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is apparently a dead duck. That's perhaps not altogether surprising. But the worse news was that the pricing of a sale of the same planes to Saudi Arabia under the Salam contract has still not yet been agreed. The announcement says the parties are "actively engaged" but a "definitive ...