Good morning. Just a brief update for you but thought I should share some sad news as a special edition.
I should add too that there will also be a special pre tax-yearend newsletter in the post in a few weeks as well, reminding investors to use their various allowances.
Sad death
Whilst it wasn’t unexpected as she had been becoming more and more frail, though we thought it wouldn’t be quite yet, Mum, Mrs Jean Reed died last Thursday evening of February 12. She would have been known to many of you and is pictured here from quite recently with our daughter Esme.
She had just finished having dinner and had started a game of ‘Upwords’ with my sister and Brother-in-Law when she took a turn for the worse and died peacefully in their presence. So, she would have been pleased for that to have been at home and stubbornly, still struggling up those stairs every night to bed and in the end, relatively painless though stoically she had endured a growing discomfort, health difficulties and pain for some time.
She was the Family’s matriarch and was 92 but she will be missed by many whose lives she touched in the Family as well as locally where she had lived all her life, being in her same Home first of all in 1947, having moved all of a quarter a mile from where she was born. Many of you will have known her and met her at various times – including the Firm’s 40th which she enjoyed and was pleased to be able to attend. Mum and Dad supported me when I established the Business, also encouraging me too by allowing me to use the spare bedroom as my office and the sitting room for the occasional meeting!
Good news/bad news
Two of our Trusts winding-up have made distributions at the net asset value, reminding investors but shares have been acquired at discounts to that asset value in anticipation of ‘something positive happening’. It’s often with sadness that a good concept is coming to an end but we have to look for substitutes after taking our special bonuses. Aberdeen Diversified Income and Growth is paying-out another 14.5p and JPMorgan Global Core another 29% of its shares at 94p, both good news events. On these two too, we have enjoyed a great income as well.
One of our more recent direct stocks – Schroder’s, agrees a deal which sees its shares rise 29% as Nuveen buys the Company. That seems undervalued but that’s over double last April’s lows – with dividends on top of course. Only recently did I repeat that the sector generally was very undervalued and the sell-off in some big advisory financial managers as new AI tools to cut costs have been announced.
That said, I am not convinced by Nat West’s purchase of Evelyn Partners for a whopping £2.7billion; the Bank is still to finalise its s166 ‘Skilled Persons Review’ commissioned by the FCA about its governance and ‘customer outcomes’ covering investment advice provided between 2010-2015! Nat West encompasses Coutts & Company private bankers as well and the Royal Bank of Scotland of course.
Corruption
Yes sadly, it is too easy to succumb to temptation for some it seems. The latest is Nicola Sturgeon’s ex-husband and sorry but I cannot for one moment believe that Ms Sturgeon had not ‘noticed’ nor enjoyed some of the spoils of her husband’s colossal spending sprees over many years. Are the police naïve to not envisage that she benefited from the fruits too and was fully aware of what was happening?
The BBC has been fronting a campaign about a Parkinson’s drug and how it has indeed led to compulsive behaviour and however sad that must have been for the victims and the families, where fraud has been involved, then others must be culpable. The one particular case was a lawyer who absconded with £600,000 of client funds.
Again, did not the wife notice the extra things being bought and enjoyed? Maybe not the sexual internet spending etc but antiques and so on? This was a systemic targeting of particular vulnerable victims too so not some random impulsive plundering of all his clients.
In Barnstaple, the biggest case of fraud and compensation the Law Society had ever faced apparently occurred at historic law firm Pitts Tuckers under Jolyon Huxtable’s control, culminating with an investigation starting in 2001. He went to jail but what about the co-solicitors in the firm working for him and the clerks processing the payments, the accountants and auditors checking the books – they are just as responsible and should have been brought to justice in their failure for not reporting suspicious activities and transactions and the clear misdirection of funds owned by others. Instead, the employees and co-solicitors simply went to work elsewhere and taking clients with them for ‘free’ (and many of these new firms even charged full fees to the Law Society for reviewing the new clients’ files of course).
Am I old school to expect that if I, or any of my colleagues, started trying to do something criminal that it would be staff’s responsibility to report it (there are also criminal money laundering rules involved and legal responsibilities there too)? That said, we have rigorous controls and systems in place to avert the chance of this anyway and have had always.
My best wishes
Philip J Milton DipFS CFPCM Chartered MCSI FPFS FCIB
Chartered Wealth Manager
Fellow Of The Personal Finance Society, Fellow Of The Chartered Institute Of Bankers
