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- Russia complied with oil output cut commitment in August

Asset management veteran Randel Freeman lined up to helm Swiss group

Activist investors at GAM have named their candidate to become chief executive at the Swiss asset manager as they move to take control after the failure of Liontrust’s takeover offer.

The activist group NewGAMe, which owns 9.6 per cent of GAM, will put forward hedge fund and asset management industry veteran Randel Freeman as chief executive, a position currently held by Peter Sanderson, at an extraordinary general meeting in September.

GAM’s shareholders turned down the Liontrust deal, with only about 33.5 per cent of the Swiss asset manager’s investors voting for the transaction, announced in May. NewGAMe called the offer “lopsided” as GAM shareholders would own 12.6 per cent of the combined entity, despite contributing about 40 per cent of the assets under management.

Following the deal’s failure, GAM’s board on Tuesday announced its intention to step down at the EGM, recommending that shareholders vote for the new directors proposed by the activists.

NewGAMe has already named its own board nominees. Antoine Spillmann, chief executive at Bruellan, part of the activist investor group, is the candidate for chair. Other board candidates include Fabien Pictet, founder of Fabien Pictet & Partners and Carlos Esteve, founder of Banque Heritage.

Part of Liontrust’s offer was a £17.8mn loan to GAM, half of which had already been drawn down. Rock Investment, which owns a controlling share in NewGAMe, has agreed to lend SFr20mn ($23mn) to replace this loan, which Liontrust has warned it could call in within 30 days. Rock Investment’s loan will then be replaced by a SFr25mn convertible bond issued by GAM, subject to shareholder approval.

Spillmann described Freeman as “an outstanding investor with significant management, client and marketing experience”.

He has worked in the hedge fund and asset management industry for more than 30 years, including as chief investment officer of Fortress Centaurus Strategies and co-head of risk arbitrage at BNP Paribas. He is currently on the investment committee of the Sterling Strategic Value Fund, an activist investor in European small and mid-cap companies, and manages a London-based activist investor, Ex-Ante Partnership.

UK fashion brand expects to report figures by end of this week

Superdry was forced to suspend its shares on Wednesday after failing to publish its annual accounts on time, with the UK fashion retailer blaming the fact it was its new auditor’s first year for the delay.

The board said it had been forced to request a temporary halt in trading as it works with auditor RSM after failing to meet an August 29 deadline, but added that it expected to post figures for the financial year ending 30 April and restore its listing on the London Stock Exchange “before the end of the week”.

The delay was “technical”, it said.

Superdry, co-founded by Julian Dunkerton and James Holder, is the latest company to suspend its shares because of audit delays, following names such as Go-Ahead and M&C Saatchi.

Nick Bubb, an independent retail analyst, said: “There has been a trend for auditors to need more time to finalise their work on retailers’ results, but it is embarrassing for Superdry to have run into the same problem just ahead of its scheduled finals.”

Superdry’s shares have lost more than half of their value over the past year as the retailer has sought to strengthen its balance sheet amid a cash crunch.

This month it borrowed £25mn from Hilco — the specialist retail investor that has also lent Wilko £40mn — on top of an £80mn loan earlier this year from Bantry Bay Capital. It also sold its intellectual property rights in the Asia-Pacific region for $50mn.

In April Superdry said it no longer expected to be “broadly break-even” after subdued demand for clothes amid the cost of living crisis.

Analysts at Peel Hunt expect it to post a pre-tax loss of £16.5mn but they are bullish about a return to profitability as Superdry slashes costs.

“Trading over summer has been mixed, very much reflecting the weather patterns,” they wrote in a recent note. “However, with tight working capital control and increasing tailwinds coming through the supply chain, we expect Superdry to continue to show good progress in [profit] margin progression.”

Danish toy group’s sales stagnate after pandemic growth spurt

Lego suffered its worst fall in profits in almost two decades as revenues stagnated after an extraordinary growth spurt from the Covid-19 pandemic came to an abrupt end.

The privately owned Danish toymaker said on Wednesday that sales in the first of the year were up 1 per cent to DKr27.4bn ($4bn) but that operating profits had dropped 19 per cent to DKr6.4bn, their biggest fall since at least 2004.

Niels Christiansen, chief executive, told the Financial Times he remained “very satisfied” as the group was outperforming a “very challenged” toy industry and cementing its position as the world’s largest toymaker by sales and profits.

He blamed the fall in profits on the “extraordinary tail” to recent raw material cost inflation and an increase in investments in new factories, software engineers and sustainability.

Christiansen added that because the company was family-owned and in a strong financial position, “we don’t start or stop investments depending on if the market is going up or down. We’ve kept outperforming the market at the same rate as the past four or five years. This year, the market was down.”

He argued that the Danish group was a long way from its last crisis in 2017 when sales and profits contracted as the company lost market share.

Lego outgrew the toy industry by an average of 12 per cent a year in the past five years, he added, while its operating profit in the first half of this year was almost double the level in the same period in 2019.

The maker of bright plastic bricks enjoyed remarkable success during the pandemic as parents flocked to its sets of police stations, Star Wars spaceships and Harry Potter castles. In the first half of 2021, its operating profits more than doubled, a rate that Christiansen said at the time was “unsustainable”.

Lego is building two new factories in Vietnam and the US that will open in 2024 and 2025 respectively, as well as expanding four of its five existing plants. It also plans to triple its spending on sustainability to $3bn a year by 2025 as it seeks to eliminate plastics derived from fossil fuels.

Its figures remain far ahead of US-listed rivals Mattel, which recently enjoyed enormous success with the Barbie film, and Hasbro. The companies each recorded operating and net losses in the first half on sales declines in the double-digit percentages, with Mattel’s revenues sliding to $1.9bn and Hasbro’s to $2.2bn.

Christiansen said he was happy for Mattel for the smash hit of the Barbie film after several Lego movie box office successes. But he added: “We still take significant market share. If you look at it, we are still the ones that grow.”

He also noted that the coronavirus pandemic had led not just to a surge in demand but also a collapse in investment in new factories, saying that when Lego talked in 2021 “about getting back to a sustainable level, this is probably the right level”.

Army officers say they have taken control from President Ali Bongo after he was declared election winner

Military officers in the oil-rich African country of Gabon announced on television on Wednesday morning that they had taken power, just hours after the electoral commission declared long-serving president Ali Bongo winner of Saturday’s election.

“In the name of the Gabonese people . . . we have decided to defend the peace by putting an end to the current regime,” the officers clad in military fatigues, who claimed to represent all the security and defence units in the nation of 2.4mn, said on the Gabon 24 TV channel.

The electoral commission earlier on Wednesday said Bongo had clinched a third term with 64.27 per cent of the vote and looked set to extend his family’s 56-year rule. Bongo has been in power since his father Omar died in office in 2009 after ruling for more than four decades.

The opposition coalition of six parties, led by economics professor Albert Ondo Ossa, got 30.77 per cent of the vote.

Ondo Ossa, who served as a minister under the elder Bongo, had claimed victory before the results were announced and alleged the election was a “fraud orchestrated by Ali Bongo and his supporters”.

If successful, the coup in Gabon would be the eighth across west and central Africa since 2020 following two putsches each in Mali and Burkina Faso, and one each in Chad, Guinea and Niger.

Gabon, a former French colony, maintains close economic and diplomatic ties to Paris. As a member of the Opec cartel of oil exporters, Gabon is a major producer in Africa, with an average of almost 200,000 barrels a day. The country also exports timber, manganese and uranium.

Despite living in a country with one of Africa’s highest incomes per capita, more than one-third of Gabonese people live below the poverty line and lack access to basic services. The president’s family has been accused of profiting from the state’s wealth at the expense of its citizens. French authorities last year charged five siblings of the current president in connection with an €85mn fraud case.

Saturday’s election took place in an almost complete media blackout as the government denied entry to all foreign outlets, according to media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. International observers were also not present to monitor the exercise.

France 24, Radio France Internationale and TV5Monde, which are wholly or partly owned by the French government, had their operations suspended by the Gabonese authorities for their alleged “lack of objectivity and balance” in their election coverage.

Late on election day, the government announced a nationwide internet shutdown to combat what it claimed were the “dangers of false information and manipulation” on the internet and imposed a curfew.

This is the second known coup attempt of Bongo’s reign. In January 2019, a small group of soldiers seized the state-owned radio station, saying they wanted to “restore democracy”. The mutiny was quickly put down with two suspected coup plotters killed.

A spokesperson for the president could not be reached.