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Survey on voting and nominee accounts

ShareSoc is working on a campaign regarding shareholder rights for private shareholders and it is important for us to obtain the evidence on whether you vote the shares you hold at General Meetings, whether you attend such meetings and whether you receive information from the companies in which you invest. We have therefore sent a survey to all of our members asking them to respond. It is also possible for non-members to complete the survey using the link below (please also ...

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 ...