The chairman of one of Britain’s oldest investment trusts has stepped down following a public board bust-up over corporate governance rules.
Fiona McBain, who has chaired Scottish Mortgage since 2017, will stand down after the London-listed investment trust’s annual meeting in June, it said on Tuesday.
The announcement comes less than a week after a fellow board member launched a fierce critique of corporate governance at the trust, including condemning Ms McBain for a lack of independence.
Amar Bhidé, who had been a non-executive director of Scottish Mortgage since 2020, last week said Ms McBain was “long past the point at which she had any independence and her role, so far as I can see, is to protect managers from criticism and questioning”.
Under the UK’s corporate governance code, chairmen are recommended to serve on the board for a maximum of nine years from the date of becoming a non-executive. Ms McBain has been a director of the company since 2009. Scottish Mortgage said on Tuesday that Mr Bhidé, who is a professor of business at Tufts University in Massachusetts, has also left the company and is no longer a director.
Scottish Mortgage, which traces its roots back to 1909, manages £13.4bn of money and has been listed on the FTSE 100 since 1986, joining the index just two years after its creation.
Over the last decade the trust made fortunes for investors by taking early stakes in hyper growth tech companies including Facebook and Tesla.
However, performance has dwindled over the past year following a slump in tech stocks. Shares in the trust have fallen by more than a third over the last 12 months. The poor performance has coincided with the departure of James Anderson, who spearheaded its investment strategy.
Ms McBain will be replaced by the company’s senior independent director Justin Dowley following its annual meeting.
Mr Dowley said: “I would like to thank Fiona for her 14 years of loyal and exceptional service to the company, in particular over the last few years (and at the request of her fellow directors) providing essential continuity, reassurance and leadership during the extraordinary circumstances of Covid-19 and through a period of transition on the board and with the managers.”
Last week, Ms McBain said she had “complete confidence” that the Scottish Mortgage board provided “robust governance and oversight”.
Scottish Mortgage's biggest holding is US pharmaceutical business Moderna, which accounts for 7.9pc of assets. Dutch chip company ASML, Tesla and ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, are also among its top ten biggest positions.