Invesco’s Mark Barnett fired from another investment trust
The decision comes just four months after the board of Edinburgh Trust removed Barnett as manager.
6th April 2020 13:19
by Tom Bailey from interactive investor
The decision comes just four months after the board of Edinburgh Trust removed Barnett as manager.
Invesco Perpetual’s Mark Barnett has been fired by the board of the Perpetual Income and Growth investment trust.
The board of trust has notified Invesco Perpetual that it is removing the company as the manager of the trust after a period of underperformance. This means Barnett, an employee of Invesco Perpetual, will not longer be the trust’s manager.
In a statement the trust’s board said: “This decision has not been taken lightly, particularly given the current market environment.”
However, it continues: “The board has previously made it clear that it was concerned with the company’s poor performance and this continued for the most recent financial year which ended 31 March 2020.”
The trust has underperformed both its benchmark and the Association of Investment Companies (AIC) UK Equity Income investment trust sector average for some time now. Over the past five years, the sector average performance has been 10.5% and the benchmark FTSE All Share index returned 3.2%. In contrast, the trust has lost 40.2% over the same period.
According to Richard Laing, chairman of the investment trust, the board has been concerned with the fund’s performance for while and had communicated its concerns before.
Liang says: “We gave Invesco time to build on the early ‘Brexit Bounce’ that was anticipated, but this proved to be short-lived.”
Consultancy firm Mercer and investment trust broker Winterflood will assist the board in its search for a new manager.
The decision comes just four months after the decision of another investment trust board, Edinburgh Trust, to remove Barnett and Invesco Perpetual as managers.
The board also cited disappointment in long-term performance. At the time (11 December 2019) the trust had returned just 13.1% over the past five years, compared to 34.7% for the AIC’s UK Equity Income sector and the FTSE All Share’s total return of 38.9% Majedie Asset Management’s James de Uphaugh was named as the trust’s new portfolio manager.
There’s also been several other trust sackings in recent months. For instance, Jupiter UK Growth recently removed Steve Davies in February of this year, replacing him with Richard Buxton, who had just joined Jupiter Fund Management following its takeover of Merian Global Investors.
Similarly, in March Strategic Equity Capital removed GVQ Investment Management, replacing it under the joint mandate of Gresham House and Aberdeen Standard Investments.
This article was originally published in our sister magazine Money Observer, which ceased publication in August 2020.
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