Small shareholders are in danger of being disenfranchised by company law that is “stuck in a 40-year-old time warp”, Archie Norman has warned the business secretary.
In an open letter, the Marks & Spencer chairman and former Conservative MP said technology should be used to resolve the problems by enabling companies to hold online annual meetings, scrapping paper annual reports and preserving the rights of nominee investors.
He said quoted UK companies were “rapidly losing sight of their investors”, with nominees now accounting for 40 per cent of the total shareholder market, preventing them from directly engaging with companies they invested in. “To put this in context, M&S has projected that at its current rate of annual decline, within 30 years the company will not
