Vallares and the corporate reputation arbitrage

Richard Lambert’s piece on Vallares and the reputation arbitrage that the £1.3bn investment vehicle is pulling off by listing on the FTSE 100 is well worth reading. It raises serious questions about how London financiers are exploiting index funds.

As Sir Richard, a former editor of the FT, points out, Tony Hayward and Nat Rothschild are pulling a neat trick by promising investors they can release the “trapped value” of commodity groups in far-flung countries with murky corporate governance:

You unlock this value by putting a respectable board of directors on top of the notepaper, by appointing managers with a strong following in financial markets, by pledging to follow all relevant corporate governance codes and by listing the shares on the London Stock Exchange, preferably on a scale that gets them into the FTSE 100 index. Suddenly investors who might previously have run a mile are queuing up to buy.