FIRST Advisers, Investor Tracking and Solicitation

An unknown shareholder has doubled their shareholding in your company overnight but they can’t be identified because they are protected by privacy legislation in their offshore jurisdiction. Or suddenly one day that unassuming one per cent shareholding held in a prime broker intermediary account disappears and is replaced by a beneficial owner of 10 per cent who votes against the Remuneration Report at the AGM, enough for a first strike.

Unfortunately such situations are becoming more common as institutional investors take advantage of legal and jurisdictional mechanisms to disguise their presence on a company’s register or the true size of their holding. Current measures in place to identify the beneficial owner of shares (as opposed to the registered owner) have increasingly been found wanting when it comes to offshore investors and the creative use of intermediary services to disguise ownership.

Click to read the rest of the article in the Listed@ASX magazine