I attended the Annual General Meeting of ShareSoc (the UK Individual Shareholders Society) yesterday via Zoom. It was not an exciting meeting.
ShareSoc represents private investors and does a lot of good work responding to public consultations and supporting campaigns on problem companies and issues. However member growth is poor and last year’s financial results were not good. They have a new Chairman since May in Heather Benjamin. I was of course one of the founders and the initial Chairman. Let us hope she can improve matters but it is not clear how she might do so.
If you are an investor in shares you should definitely join as it costs very little to do so – see: https://www.sharesoc.org/ . ShareSoc needs to promote what it does for investors but it regularly misses opportunities to represent private shareholders by PR activity. For example I don’t recall it commenting on the merger of Alliance Trust and Witan, nor on the share split at Polar Capital Technology Trust, both of which I thought were negative events for a large number of shareholders.
Mark Northway gave a summary of current policy issues and campaigns in the meeting and Jema Arnold covered the activities of Signet which seems to be expanding – they run discussion groups. Mike Dennis covered events and the financial results. They clearly need more funds as they are burning cash to promote growth which is slow in coming through.
There were few questions from the audience but one was about what happened over the law suits attacking the fund raising at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Investors in the rights issue feel they were grossly misled and although some compensation was eventually obtained it was relatively small. The main winners seemed to be lawyers and litigation funders.
There were three or more legal groups involved and I can explain to people what happened and why as I was initially involved in one of them. Call me on 020-8295-0378 if you want more explanation.
Overall this was a useful if unexciting meeting. Combining proxy votes with Zoom voting and physical “show of hands” voting for members present is not easy. I suggest if meetings are electronic then voting should only be by proxy in advance.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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