Alliance chief underlines his allegiance to new-look trust

Lord Smith said his priority is to see discount narrow further

ALLIANCE Trust chairman Lord Smith of Kelvin has assured the 129-year old investment trust’s shareholders that he will not take up his new role as chairman of the British Business Bank (BBB) until the sale of the Green Investment Bank (GIB) completes.

Responding to a question from a shareholder at Alliance Trust’s annual general meeting (AGM) in Dundee yesterday, Lord Smith said as he would be giving up the chairmanship of GIB prior to joining BBB’s board the amount of time he could commit to Alliance Trust would remain unaltered.

In pointing out that Lord Smith is also chairman of Forth Ports and engineering group IMI, the investor asked: “With all these appointments do you have sufficient time to be able to concentrate on Alliance Trust?”

Lord Smith noted that Australia’s Macquarie is in the process of buying GIB, with the deal scheduled to close in mid-June.

“I will absolutely not take on the British Business Bank until I come off as chair and director of the Green Investment Bank,” he said. “I will have the exact same time commitments. I’ll be swapping one for the other.”

Lord Smith, who in the wake of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence was asked by then Prime Minister David Cameron to head a commission overseeing further devolution commitments, added that he would not take on a similar role to that in future.

“In terms of the Scotland Devolution Commission, I’m never going to do that again,” he said. “Don’t get me started.”

Lord Smith was speaking at Alliance Trust’s first AGM since shareholders backed a radical overhaul of the way the company is managed.

Until the beginning of this month the trust had been run for the past two and half years by Peter Michaelis and Simon Clements of Alliance Trust Investments (ATI), which was also one of the stocks in the portfolio.

ATI has since been sold to Liontrust Asset Management and the trust has passed to eight individual managers who have been picked and are being overseen by investment firm Willis Towers Watson.

While a number of shareholders at the AGM spoke out in favour of the change in approach, the board fielded questions about how it intends to manage the discount at which the trust’s shares trade.

Since December the board has bought back and cancelled over 150 million shares, the majority of which were previously owned by activist investor Elliott Advisors. This has led to a reduction in net assets from around £3.3 billion to £2.5bn and a narrowing in the discount from 11 per cent last June to five per cent now, with one shareholder saying “it is great to see it reduced and I hope it never, ever gets to reach where it was under the last regime”.

However, another shareholder queried whether buybacks would be the only method the board would use to “control the discount”. Lord Smith said the board “wants demand to control the discount”, adding that a key priority now is to convince “gatherers of wealth” to invest their clients’ cash in the vehicle. Board member Clare Dobie said the trust would launch a major marketing campaign later this year to encourage new investors in.

Fellow board member Karl Sternberg added: “We would like our shares to be at a premium and be able to issue shares like Scottish Mortgage has done.”

Deputy chairman Gregor Stewart added that while the turnaround in the fund’s performance “will take some time”, the board believes that “when it comes through” it will result in increased demand and therefore a narrowing of the discount.