Magazine Issue 7: DIY Research

Magazine Issue 7 - Spring 1998

DIY Research: Whose Fair share?

For the last few years the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CMT) has been running the Clean Investment Campaign. The aim is to persuade various public bodies to disinvest from arms exporting companies. Ray Hemmings, Coordinator of the Campaign, reports.

Public companies are required by law to submit a list of their shareholders each year. Every third year this has to be a complete list: in the intervening years just a list of changes may be submitted.

Fiches
These lists may be seen at, or bought from, Companies House (Cardiff CF4 3UZ). They come in the form of a set of microfiches - photographs of the pages on which the lists were originally typed. There are typically 288 (18 by 16) pages on each fiche, and on each page about 20 shareholders may be listed. There may be anything from 5 to near 100 of these fiches. The photographs are of course minute and can only be deciphered with the help of a fiche-reader (often available in public libraries).

Each entry gives the name and address of the investor, the number of shares, and types of shares, held. A lot of information for a fiver! We were looking for all the churches, charities, health authorities, hospitals, local authorities and others. A long and trying job. If you are looking just for a particular name, it's easy. But there is one complication.

Nominees
Many investors choose to disguise their identity by employing finance firms called "Nominees" and their investments will appear in the name of their Nominee together with a code assigned by the Nominee to each of its clients. Such an entry might read, for example: Rock Nominees Ltd KENS 13000 SACS 5000 etc.

These entries have to be decoded. This is done with help of a book called The Index of Nominees and their Beneficial Owners which lists all the Nominees and who the codes refer to. It would tell us that the above entry means that Lord Kensington has 13,000 shares and St Cecelia's Abbey has 5000 shares. (These examples are fictitous.)

The process
If you are doing the sort of job that we are involved in you may be interested in the procedure we found useful.

Dealing with the Nominees is a bit troublesome. We found it best to trawl through 350 pages of the book, making a list of those Nominees (and codes) with clients of the kind for which we were looking. Then, armed with this list, the first job was to scan the fiches picking out entries which fell into any of the categories we were interested in, and looking at those Nominees on our list to see if any of the relevant codes appeared.

We noted all these entries as follows: E Univ of Bristol 1765455 11 Broca Noms (M&G Group) UBUKH Boodle Dental Surgeries Ltd Closed 9 B 1 36 Saxon Gate West, Milton Keynes MK9 2CH (Sold 11851)

This says that the Educational Institution (E) University of Bristol, using Broca~ Nominees with code UBUK holds 1,765,455 shares. It is recorded on fiche no. I I page F3. (The latter information is useful if we want to check the entry for some reason later.) Under Health (H) Boodle Surgeries sold 11,851 shares during the year, closing their account.

At this stage the entries are all jumbled up, so the next step is to list them in their various categories.

This has to be done for each of the companies we were investigating and then the final stage was to make out sheets for each category, listing the institutions holding shares in any of the seven companies we sampled. These are the lists that we publish in the CIC Pack (see Box).

It is a lengthy and tedious process and it is difficult to avoid the odd error. We therefore take the precaution of writing to each institution to give them the chance to correct our findings before we make them public. We also have to explain that the findings may inevitably be out-of-date. Shares will have been bought and sold since the annual returns were made. This is aggravated by the fact that companies may make their returns at any date during the calender year. Some may do it in May, others not until November, which means that some entries are perhaps eight months old before we are ready to publish. However, this does not seem to affect the usefulness of the lists on the whole.

References: The Index of Nominees and their Beneficial Owners It is published by Fulcrum Research Ltd, 254 Goswell Road, London ECIV 7EB (tel: 0171 253 0353).This book is revised annually. It costs about _300 (each year!). But discounts may be negotiable by non-commercial outfits.

Campaign Against Arms Trade: Clean Investment Campaign (CIC)
This campaign aims to persuade various public bodies to get rid of any shares they may hold in arms-exporting companies. It is mainly a letter-writing campaign.

We have produced a CIC Pack for campaigners which gives a wealth of information about the arms trade, suggestions about letter-writing, how to respond to the replies you may get, plus lists of institutions known to hold investments (free updates each year).

The full Pack costs _5: or you can order a single section for _2.50 - Local Authorities, or Religious Institutions; or Health Institutions + Charities. These single sections also include a lengthy introduction.

CAAT, 11 Goodwin Street, London N4 3HQ (tel: 0171 281 0297)

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