Shareholders meddle in details, do not understand the businesses they invest in and secretly team up with activists, the chairs of Britain’s top listed companies have claimed.
Amid claims that the relationship between institutional shareholders and Britain’s leading boards had deteriorated beyond repair, the new State Of Stewardship report asked whether the very model of the public company was broken.
The authors interviewed 35 chairs of UK listed companies, including 26 in the FTSE 100, and concluded that there needed to be a complete reset in the relationship. While most remarks were anonymised, Landsec chair Cressida Hogg was one of those interviewed.
Senior figures from the institutional world were also interviewed, including those from Schroders, Capital Group and M&G. The fund managers argued that they were spread more thinly, had more stakeholders to please and that the UK was regarded as a backwater.
