SCOTTISH fund management giant abrdn has been required to delay a shareholder vote on its planned £1.5 billion takeover of the Interactive Investor platform business because of a global shortage of paper.
The former Standard Life Aberdeen had planned to hold the vote before it releases its annual results on March 1.
However, regulations requiring firms to give shareholder paper copies of documents concerning big takeovers have posed challenges for the Edinburgh-based group. Its shareholders include huge numbers of small investors along with major institutions.
The vote on the Interactive Investor deal is now expected to be held in mid March.
abrdn chief executive Stephen Bird has described the planned takeover of Interactive Investor as transformational.
Subject to shareholder approval, it will give abrdn control of a business that provides services such as share dealing and portfolio management technology for 400,000 customers.
A spokesperson for abrdn told Sky news: “ We would have liked to get the shareholder circular out a little earlier but have had to work around the paper supply problems as we are required to write to over a million shareholders."
The paper shortage that has affected abrdn reflects the supply chain problems that the fallout from the pandemic has caused around the world.
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 here