Is one of Britain’s biggest asset managers past repair?
It’s not been a good year for the UK asset management sector — heck, it’s not been good for a few years. Even so, Abrdn sticks out as having some particularly painful problems. They wouldn’t be straightforward to fix at the best of times. Abrdn’s board is not having the best of times.
There’s investment performance. Outflows. An expensive acquisition. A much-mocked rebrand. Problems with the paperwork in some of its Luxembourg-based funds. Shares that have slipped so much that five years after an £11bn merger, the company fails to make the FTSE 100 any more. Around 9 per cent of its shares sold short, according to Markit figures. A chief executive who seems to have alienated analysts.
That’s before you get to a Sunday Times report that the boss doesn’t have the backing of some of his staff either, an account that Abrdn disputes. The group said in response to the article that “these anonymous allegations contain a number of factual inaccuracies and do not represent the reality of the open and transparent culture we are building”.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Cat Rutter Pooley
