Here’s another question about John McDonnell’s whizzy “inclusive ownership funds”, or IOFs. What happens when companies get taken over?
Sky is about to be bought by Comcast for £30bn in cash, so a workers’ fund, if it held the eventual 10% stake that the shadow chancellor intends, in theory would be entitled to £3bn. Divvy up the sum among the 30,000 Sky staff and it comes to £100,000 a head, which would be a supremely generous gift to the Murdoch toilers from a socialist chancellor.
Would employees see the money in practice? If McDonnell has developed rules to deal with takeover situations, he’s yet to share them. As with the £500-per-worker cap on annual dividends, one can only speculate that his Treasury would demand the lion’s share when the pots of money become huge. Or perhaps, since only income from dividends has been mentioned to date, employees would be denied takeover windfalls altogether. In that case, they would never really have owned the shares in the first place, either individually or collectively.
Definitive details of McDonnell’s proposal are promised in time. Let’s hope so, because the workers themselves would surely want to know if they would be quids in when acquisitions happen. Put another way, the IOF idea has not been thought through in detail. Best to get a more credible version on the table sharpish, which means a plan that does not dilute pension funds’ investments and is not seen as a tax grab.
Employee share ownership is fertile ground for a popular policy, as McDonnell has correctly identified, and the Tories will surely be working on a rival scheme. Even amid their Brexit shambles, they will not find it hard to find a proposal that is more financially coherent.
Hargreaves must shout louder about Unilever technicalities
“Our aim is to give you all the tools, information and support you need to venture into the world of investing,” says the blurb on Hargreaves Lansdown’s website. Customers who hold shares in Unilever via the investment platform may beg to differ.
Hargreaves’ email to Unilever shareholders, before the big “go Dutch” vote next month, omitted a crucial piece of information – the fact that, for their vote to count in the possibly crucial “majority in number” tally, private shareholders need to get their shares registered in certified form, in the jargon.
The “majority in number” test, remember, is the poll in which each shareholder gets one vote, whether they own 100 shares or 100,000. It is different from the conventional vote that counts the pure numbers of shares.
The certification problem is this: the 20,000 people who hold Unilever shares via Hargreaves fall under nominee arrangements. For the “majority in number” poll, they will be pooled within Hargreaves Nominees Ltd, which gets only one vote. But it’s easy to remove oneself from the pool by asking for a certified shareholding, albeit Hargreaves will charge a fee.
So you would think Hargreaves would shout loudly about this important technical detail. After all, it’s supposed to be a champion of private investors and the Unilever vote is rare chance for small shareholders to make a difference. But the platform did not mention the voting wrinkle in its email. It just advertised its normal pooled voting service, which is ideal most of the time – just not on this occasion.
Hargreaves agrees it failed to be explicit. For customers who feel aggrieved, it suggests buying a single certified share to get full bang for voting buck. That is good advice that should have been given earlier and explicitly.
Ashley goes Day-Glo route
You can see some shocking pictures on the Daily Star website. For example, there’s evidence that at least some House of Fraser stores are now selling Sports Direct products – Lee Cooper belts, Adidas tracksuits and so on – complete with ugly Sports Direct Day-Glo stickers.
Mike Ashley, after Sports Direct’s purchase of HoF out of administration, can run the business as he wishes, of course. One suspects shifting a lot of stock quickly was always part of his strategic plan as Christmas approaches. And those loyal HoF customers who pine for the pre-takeover “luxurious” image may recall that the old regime was not averse to holding a vulgar sale or two.
But Ashley’s tactics suggest his vision for HoF to become “the Harrods of the high street” is not going to be realised quickly. Nobody, surely, expected it to be.
