Scottish Mortgage chair quits after governance row
The chair of one of the UK’s biggest tech investors is standing down after a corporate governance row.
Fiona McBain, who has chaired Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust since 2017 and sat on its board for 14 years, will leave after the trust’s annual meeting in June.
The FTSE 100-listed trust, the flagship fund of tech-focused investment company Baillie Gifford, also said Prof Amar Bhidé had left the board, after Bhidé questioned McBain’s independence and flagged concerns over governance issues and the trust’s exposure to illiquid investments.
Scottish Mortgage, one of the UK’s oldest investment trusts, also lost its co-manager James Anderson last summer. The star technology investor claimed the fund management industry was “irretrievably broken” when he quit, blaming a focus on short-term returns and “seeking minor opportunities in banal companies”.
Anderson generated huge returns for investors by giving early backing to technology companies such as Tesla, Amazon and China’s Tencent and Alibaba. More recent investments include the Swedish battery maker Northvolt and the Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna. However, the trust’s shares have plunged amid the tech rout, falling 34% over the past year.
Bhidé, a business professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts, who had been a director of Scottish Mortgage since 2020, told the Financial Times last week that he had clashed with McBain over the process to appoint two new board members and his assessment of the risks posed by the trust’s investments in unquoted companies, valued at £3.8bn at the end of January.
McBain will be succeeded by Justin Dowley, the company’s senior independent director, who also chairs Melrose Industries and is a deputy chair of the Takeover Panel.
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