Jim Armitage: Is this real reason for Sir Christopher Hohn’s attack on Stock Exchange?
Sir Christopher Hohn’s clearly not one for giving up. Despite having lost his battle to reinstate Xavier Rolet as chief executive at the London Stock Exchange, he is still pressing for chairman Donald Brydon to be fired, an outcome that would leave the business with no permanent chief executive or chairman.
Brydon has hardly covered himself in glory over the Rolet affair, but even his greatest critics must be nervous at the prospect of having zero leadership continuity at the LSE as we head into Brexit. It’s a recipe for instability, perhaps even leaving the stock market vulnerable to a foreign takeover.
One is tempted to wonder whether that might have occurred to Hohn.
In April, after the collapse of the LSE-Deutsche Börse merger, he wrote to investors in his TCI fund that he hoped InterContinental Exchange would now bid. In the letter, he raved about the logic of creating a business owning both ICE’s Liffe derivatives exchange and the LSE’s LCH.Clearnet.
Might that now be his endgame?
Other hedgies not unknown to TCI would not protest at such an outcome. Hohn’s key ally in the Rolet campaign, Egerton Capital, is an ICE and LSE shareholder. Dan Loeb’s Third Point, which quietly wrote to the LSE board in support of Hohn’s request for transparency, also owns shares in both, as has activist Lone Pine. Lone Pine was a big investor in Deutsche Börse in 2008 when Hohn successfully agitated for the chairman’s departure there, too. And both invested in Internet provider Charter Communications, which Hohn has argued should merge with Verizon.
They tend to hunt in packs, these activists. And you can never quite tell what the endgame is until they’re walking away, rich, leaving you wondering where your shirt can have got to.
One can be excused for coming up with conspiracy theories.
