Banks' failure to lend to the corporate sector is creating "tremendous opportunities" for smaller players, Sir Peter Burt has said.
The former Bank of Scotland chief, who reported for the UK Government this summer on setting up a business bank, said he was "quite disturbed by the squeeze on small and medium-sized businesses".
But he said his own Promethean Investments -where he and sons Hamish and Michael Burt are partners - was among those set to expand to take advantage of the demand for finance.
Sir Peter was commenting on the suspension of trading in the shares of Promethean, the AIM-listed specialist investment group he created in 2005 with Promethean Investments as manager.
The listed group, where Lloyds Banking Group inherited a 22% stake from Bank of Scotland, has been in wind-up since shareholders voted in 2009 for a return of their cash, and had hoped to liquidate all its assets by the end of last year. But the company was left holding its major stake in TIS, the biggest player in the depressed traded endowment policy market, and its associated Protected Asset TEP Fund (PATF).
A bid from PATF for TIS emerged earlier this year but was aborted. In March, Sir Peter, Promethean's chairman, told shareholders the continued delay was "immensely frustrating".
Yesterday a plan finally emerged which will see TIS reverse into Promethean to acquire its AIM listing as a renamed "multi-strategy investment company". Sir Peter confirmed that would end the Burt connection.
Promethean shares, once at 132p, were suspended at 10p yesterday, valuing the business at £5.2 million, half of what Sir Peter said it paid for TIS. Shareholders have since 2009 received 94p a share back in sale proceeds.
Sir Peter said: "Timing was not great in the sense that in the middle of 2005 we were very close to the peak of the market. If you look back we did a pretty good job for the investors in the round, and they have had a substantial profit back over the last seven years."
He said if the proposed deal went ahead, Promethean shareholders would be left with "a smaller percentage of a bigger company" which had plans to widen its investment activities.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article