Alliance Trust: a victory for shareholder activists

Alliance Trust’s surrender marks the biggest victory yet for shareholder activists in Britain.

Alliance Trust, Britain's biggest investment trust, has reached a last-minute deal with Elliott Advisors, a US activist hedge fund that is the trust's largest investor. Elliott, irked by what it viewed as high fees, an inflated salary for the chief executive and poor investment returns, had led a campaign to bring fresh blood into the board.

A vote on its proposals was scheduled for the trust's annual general meeting on 29 April. However, a day before the AGM, Alliance headed off the vote by agreeing to put two of Elliott's three nominees on the board in return for a ceasefire until next year's annual meeting, in May 2016.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.