By CALUM MUIRHEAD, This is Money, 10 February 2025:
Wall Street raider Boaz Weinstein has launched another assault on four UK investment trusts after failing to take over six others.
Weinstein’s firm Saba Capital announced yesterday that it will call meetings at the trusts to vote on whether to change their structure.
The trusts in Saba’s crosshairs are CQS Natural Resources Growth and Income, European Smaller Companies Trust (ESCT), Middlefield Canadian Income and Schroder UK Mid Cap Fund.
It marks a change in tactics from Saba’s recent campaign when it proposed ousting the boards of seven London-listed trusts and replacing them with its own allies.
Six of these trusts have decisively rejected Weinstein’s proposals. The seventh, Edinburgh Worldwide, is voting on Friday.
Of the four new targets, two – CQS and ESCT – defeated Saba’s attempts to unseat their boards at meetings last week..
Saba said that turning the four closed-ended trusts into open-ended would ‘eliminate’ their ‘discount’, the difference between the trust’s share price and the value of its assets..
James Carthew, of investment trusts research firm QuotedData, said: ‘Saba doesn’t seem to have got the message.
‘When [Weinstein] is inevitably knocked back again, will he admit defeat or are we condemned to an endless cycle of pointless attacks?’
Read more here