Schroder European Real Estate (SERE) shareholders yesterday approved the two-to-three-year wind-up of the £81m real estate investment trust announced in June. At a general meeting, 99.4% of votes on a 54% turnout backed an amendment to the company’s articles and a change to investment strategy so that its assets can be sold and capital returned to shareholders. At 59.8p, the shares stand 37% below net asset value.
Aurora UK Alpha (ARR), the £264m UK All Companies investment trust run by Gary Channon and Kartik Kumar at Phoenix Asset Management, saw its value stock portfolio rise 2.4% in August, ahead of the 0.7% total return from the FTSE All-Share index. Nintendo, the Japanese video game company that is its sixth biggest holding, advanced 18.2% over the month after results. The other main contributor was Barratt Redrow, the UK’s biggest housebuilder and the trust’s second largest position, which rallied 8.5% after responding to Channon’s call for share buybacks in July. These gains were partly offset by falls of 3.6% and 2.8% in Ryanair and Lloyds, and left net asset value down 2.1% in the year to date against the 11.9% increase in the FTSE All-Share. ARR stands on an 11% discount having returned 94.7% to shareholders since Phoenix took over in January 2016. Over the same period, the UK benchmark has returned 162%, representing 49.5% underperformance by ARR, according to its factsheet.
EJF Investments (EJFI), the £111m investor in high-yielding US regulatory bank debt, has appointed Bronwyn Curtis, chair of TwentyFour Income Fund (TFIF) and senior independent director at BH Macro (BHMG), and Martin Rowley, former head of Deloitte’s Jersey tax practice, to its three-strong board. They will join the Jersey investment company on 1 October ahead of the retirements of Nick Watkins and Alan Dunphy next year, said chair John Kingston. Last week EJFJ reported a 5.4% return in the second quarter. The company has £79.6m of ordinary shares and £31.5 of zero dividend preference shares, according to the Association of Investment Companies.
