KEEP UNILEVER IN BRITAIN!
THE idea that a firm as prestigious and influential as Unilever, with a British heritage dating back to its foundation at Port Sunlight on the Wirral in the late 19th century, should be proposing to leave these shores is a terrible shock.
Unilever is as British as Marmite – one of its big-name products – and 60 per cent of its annual sales of £54billion originate from the UK.
The prospect of the giant moving out of the City became a reality last week when a 200-page prospectus, filled with complex technical detail and legalese, was delivered to investors who will vote on the issue at the end of next month.
If the Anglo-Dutch behemoth were to leave this country, it would have to quit the FTSE 100 index and, as a result, many of the big pension funds and insurers that look after the retirement funds of every pensioner and future retiree in Britain would be precluded from owning shares in one of our best-managed and most ethical and environmentally- conscious companies.
The rules of many UK pension funds require that they only invest in UK-quoted companies for reasons of prudence, accountability and governance.
Not surprisingly, one of the country’s biggest investors, the insurer Aviva, is rightly crying foul over the idea of Unilever’s move – arguing that the firm would no longer be a British company.
Aviva’s chief investment officer, David Cumming, told the Financial Times: ‘We are not supportive and will vote against it. It doesn’t add any value for us and we lose quite a large company from the index. We don’t see any justification for the move.’
The reason Unilever wants to rebase in the Netherlands is founded on its bruising experience last year when it was subject of a £ 110billion takeover bid, which ultimately failed.
In what would have been the second largest corporate deal in history, US giant Kraft Heinz (backed by private equity firms and the support one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett) launched an unsolicited bid for the maker of countless household names such as Dove soap and Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
Unilever’s Dutch chief executive, Paul Polman, a staunch advocate of ethical capitalism, fought off the bid and vowed to protect Unilever’s golden heritage from predators.
To try to guarantee this and prevent any future raids, it was felt that the firm’s Anglo-Dutch structure, with share quotations, boards and headquarters in both Britain and Holland, should be simplified. This, management feels, is best achieved by a switch to Rotterdam.
The intention is that Unilever will follow Royal Dutch Shell and the publishing and media colossus Reed Elsevier ( now renamed Relx) which both separately decided to unify their shares under one umbrella while keeping share quotations in London as part of the FTSE 100 index.
But Unilever wants to go one step further by coming out of the FTSE 100, claiming that it has more major Dutch than