AJ Bell and Helena Morrissey: opposites attract

Helena Morrissey: Bell tsar

Opposites attract? It’s one explanation for why Helena Morrissey is quitting the board of St James’s Place after just 14 months to chair rival investment platform AJ Bell.

Andy Bell, AJ Bell co-founder and chief executive, sees himself as outside the City establishment, railing against the “tokenism” and “box ticking” expected by corporate governance and social responsibility campaigners. Morrissey founded the 30 per cent Club to lobby for gender equality in boardrooms and since leaving Newton Investment Management in 2016 has remained a fixture on the City conference circuit.

Nevertheless, the appointment is a corrective measure for a boardroom that until now had five men and only one woman, in contravention of government recommendations. Earlier this year, shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis called for a protest vote against outgoing chair Les Platts, saying AJ Bell was hiding behind “boilerplate language” having “made no progress on gender diversity since its market debut in December 2018”. Whatever qualities Morrissey brings to the role, her arrival ticks a box.

Simon Mackenzie Smith: spoof proof

The day we talk, Simon Mackenzie Smith is off work for the afternoon to get the vaccine. Covid-19 had already made the year complicated for Bank of America longstanding chair of UK and Ireland Corporate and Investment Banking. His retirement plan, announced this week, had to be shuffled around lockdowns that “lasted longer than we all thought”. A farewell is scheduled for June but a celebration of his 36 years in the City has to wait until autumn.

“There was a rumour going around that, because I’m a Yorkshireman, I was trying to sneak out of the door without buying a drink,” Mackenzie Smith said. “I agreed that I would stay on through the pandemic because it’s a difficult time for the junior bankers to be building new relationships digitally. It was a time when the older people with some of the relationships needed to stand up and make sure that they’re doing their bit.”

Relationship management is Mackenzie Smith’s forte — from acting as sole adviser to Royal Dutch Shell for its $65bn purchase of BG to playing spoof with Mike Ashley to settle the bill for Sports Direct’s flotation. He describes the job as being a C-suite consigliere, advising on how best to deploy his firm’s might and reach to deliver a strategy.

The corporate broking franchise he helped create took as its foundation Smith New Court, which when bought out by Merrill Lynch in 1995 was Britain’s biggest independent stockbroker. Though rivals such as Goldman Sachs had been importing US takeover defence techniques to the City, having a strong equities business gave Merrill an edge.

“The best in those days were probably Hoare Govett and Cazenove,” he said. “We went to people and said: look, you don’t need both of them because they’re essentially doing the same thing. Why don’t you hire us as one of your brokers, we genuinely have the best equity distribution system in the world.”

As for the past year, it’s mission complete. “Given the support institutions like ours and the big banks received during the financial crisis, this was a time when we needed to lean in.”

Chris Hohn: Rolet model

Though glowing praise for contemporaries is no rarity on LinkedIn, it was a surprise to see a post this week from Xavier Rolet calling hedge fund manager Chris Hohn “one of the world’s savviest and most successful investors”.

Hohn threw punches on behalf of London Stock Exchange’s former chief executive during a bizarre stand-off with LSE chair, Donald Brydon, which followed the collapse of the exchange’s merger with Deutsche Boerse in 2017. Taking the view that Rolet had been sacked, Hohn’s TCI fund requisitioned a shareholder meeting to call for his reinstatement and Brydon’s dismissal — a row that needed an intervention from Bank of England governor Mark Carney to help resolve. The Rolet camp was insistent at the time that Hohn was acting of his own volition.