Current Account has often wondered about institutional investors who are content to sit on their hands while a company in which they have invested their policyholders' money is run into the ground.
Fund managers invariably say that it isn't their role to get involved in day-to-day management of companies in which they invest. "Management must be allowed to manage" is the fund managers' mantra. Well, that's all very well if management is doing a decent job, but all too often the reluctance of fund managers to get involved smacks of complacency.
By now, most of the fund managers who were once enthusiastic members of the James Crean fan club and who once thought Ray McLoughlin was something of a management god have probably written off the company.
But for some reason, it emerged at the recent Crean annual meeting that institutional shareholders voted 13 million shares to re-elect Ray McLoughlin as a director, despite the efforts of small shareholders to vote him off the board. Why? Is Ray McLoughlin - paid in excess of £200,000 a year - doing such a sterling job that he warrants such an endorsement.
Think about it. Crean shares were trading at 30 cents this week. Six years ago they were trading at 10 times that level. James Crean has no future, and if, as company broker Davy estimates, it has net asset value of almost 64 cents a share - more than twice the price in the market - it should be liquidated and the proceeds divided among shareholders.
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