CITY AND SUBURBAN
Wear your hard hat when the single-issue mob comes to the shareholders' meeting
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Imust buy a share in Wimpey, the builders. Then I can go to the meetings and wear my hard hat. This week's was action- packed, and its high point came when an elderly shareholder, driven to frenzy by protesters, picked up his chair and attempt- ed to crown one. I wish he had succeeded, for they were a distasteful mob, 20 or 30 of them, smashing glasses, breaking up the scenery and putting fear into some though, as I say, not all — of their fellow shareholders. The protesters held shares or proxies, but their evident purpose was not to argue a case, question the board or vote on resolutions, but to disrupt the meeting. (What were they protesting about? I for- get.) As it happened, Wimpey's chairman, Sir John Quinton, had learned in the hard school of Barclays not to lose his patience, not to lose control and not to let go of the microphone. Experience told. I can bring you this account in spite of Wimpey's ner- vous decision to exclude not the mob but the press. As a way of dealing with a protest group, this was like kicking the cat to teach the dog a lesson, and just as effec- tive. Those who try to kick cats end up stubbing their toes. City editors, too, can buy shares or arrange for proxies. (I still have the five shares in Oldham Estates which admitted me to its meetings, then chaired by Harry Hyams in a Mickey Mouse mask.) Company boards are not the only people who must now decide how to handle single-issue mobs. They have cer- tain advantages. They can with reasonable confidence put matters to the vote. They could try arming senior shareholders with chairs, but they would do better to let the mobs show themselves up as the foes of shareholder democracy. That would be worth reporting.
Not wanted on voyage
IT ALWAYS worries me to think that the Confederation of British Industry may rep- resent its members. It would worry me to think that Howard Davies, its ambitious director-general, might represent the CBI. He is off to the Bank of England as Deputy Governor, and I urge him to leave all his baggage behind him. It will not be wanted on his voyage. The inconsistent wishful thinking that the CBI likes to put out those pleas for stable but competitive exchange rates and for sound but cheap money, for more spending on infrastructure but for more and better tax breaks, for a world where shareholders did not insist on dividends and the pound had been cured of Sits irritating habit of goifig up and down I have come to believe that this is is trans- mitted telepathically to Centre Point, the CBI's headquarters, from a golf club bar in the nut-and-bolt belt of the Midlands. Some of the gin is strained out and the residue is recycled as policy. It must help to keep the leadership in touch with the sub- scribers, but, except about the pound, Mr Davies surely knows better.
Second time lucky
A VETERAN Deputy Governor — I am glad to say that there are plenty of them lets Howard Davies know what to expect. `Quite simple,' he says. 'The Deputy is there to tell the Governor when he's wrong. Now Eddie is right quite a lot of the time — 80 per cent of it, maybe even 90. But when he's wrong . .' Downing Street (where the appointment is made) seems to think of the Deputy as part of a system of checks and balances. Eddie George, so the argument runs, is a Bank man through and through, which makes him an insider, so we need to install an outsider, and if this out- sider is an insider at our end of town — one of us, in fact, or a chum of one of us — so much the better. Oh, well, second time lucky. One lesson learned-from the last fias- co is that the process of selection ought not to be scamped. Last time the Bank's direc- tors had to read of the appointment in the papers. This time they were at least consult- ed. In a well-run company, the directors are the checks and balances. It is their job to see that their company has the executive management it needs. It is their job, and not the deputy chairman's, to tell the chair- man when he's wrong. As for Mr Davies, if he makes his own mistakes, he will avoid his predecessor's — though he must reflect when he moves in that a title on the door rates a carpet on the floor.
Huffing and puffing
CLOUDS OF verbiage hang heavy over, Washington this week. The economic smokestack industries — the Group of Seven ministers, the International Mone- tary Fund — are working at full blast, and although their productive output may be minimal, their huffing, and puffing is as spectacular as '64er. Verbal pollution experts register the fruity qualities of Michel Camdessus, the IMF's managing director for the next two years — place your bets on the succession now. It was Mr Camdessus who offered Mexico $17 billion without consulting his resident directors from Britain and continental Europe there wasn't time, apparently. Next year, he says, Mexico will come out of this crisis even stronger that it was before. Even stronger? What a miraculously helpful cri- sis: please can we have another one, soon? Like Chancellors before him, Kenneth Clarke, having got no change out of his opposite numbers at the meetings, looks set to come home and put interest rates up.
It's an insurance job
I CANNOT bring myself to panic at the notion that Lloyd's of London will not pass its MOT test. The grand old banger will be wheeled into its local garage at the Board of Trade, but since the garage and the chauffeur (a monastic type called Peter Middleton) both say it will be all right, I dare say they can fix it. Something else will then go wrong or fall off. To me it resem- bles my cousin's 1934 Frazer Nash: he said that the engine would do 80 but the car wouldn't.
By derivation
DERIVATIVES, the bane of Barings, Orange County's juicer, source of doubt at Bankers Trust — what exactly are they? The answer reaches me from an eminent supervisor in America. He, too, was puz- zled. A derivative, he now concludes, is something that someone has bought which has turned out to cost him money.
Previous page
