At today’s meeting of Edinburgh Worldwide shareholders that was requisitioned by Saba Capital, Saba’s proposals were overwhelmingly rejected by 63.8% to 36.2%.

The turnout at the meeting was 64.7%.

Edinburgh Worldwide’s chair Jonathan Simpson-Dent said: “Edinburgh Worldwide’s shareholders have spoken: they have rejected Saba Capital’s proposal for a fundamentally different strategy based on fundamentally different principles with a fundamentally different investment approach.

“Today’s result confirms that this unique mandate still appeals, but shareholders also expect the Trust to deliver. We took decisive action in 2024 with positive early results. Our job now is to deliver the performance our shareholders rightly expect.”

This makes seven losses of seven votes called by Saba. It seemed obvious to everyone after the Herald vote some weeks ago that there was virtually no support for Saba’s plans. It could have withdrawn the other requisitions then and saved everyone a lot of time and money, but it ploughed on regardless.

Now it has demanded four more meetings, changing tack by requesting that these trusts convert to an open-ended structure. Again, it has been strongly criticised for jumping the gun as boards were already considering how to deal with their relatively recently acquired, aggressive shareholder. It has backtracked on one vote – at European Smaller Companies Trust, giving the board more time to come up with a proposal. Hopefully, we won’t have months and months of this to come.

EWI : Edinburgh Worldwide rejects Saba, monumental waste of time and money