CITY AND SUBURBAN
Dividends shouldn't be wasted on shareholders buy Wimbledon tickets instead
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
It was my father's view, from many years' experience as a company chairman, that dividends were wasted on people like shareholders. Now it is gaining ground. Robin Cook, Michael Heseltine's incongru- ous shadow, has adopted it, and Stephen Dorrell, Financial Secretary to the Trea- sury and tipped for higher things, has used it to scare the stock market out of its scat- tered wits. It must be said of Mr Cook's ideas that they are an intellectual improve- ment on the economic bits of Labour's Euro-manifesto — which were plainly dis- covered on some shelf in Transport House, and dusted down and printed without pass- ing through a human brain. This was a by- product of the party's tactics under John Smith, when its economic policy was to rely on the Conservatives to mess things up. One way and another, a genuine economic debate and a touch of rancour and asperity were overdue. The odd thing about what Mr Cook had to say was that it made him sound not like the shadow Hezza, but the substance. Companies needed protection, he said, against greedy shareholders and predatory bidders. Managers should be set free to take the long view and to hang on to the money they would need to finance this. They might, of course, use it to finance Wim- bledon debentures, private aircraft, top hat pensions and other executive toys. Once cap- ital stops being a scarce resource, with a price attached to it, all sorts of uses suggest themselves. What a coincidence, though! Only a month ago, the great Hezza band- wagon was rolling through the City, with happy hints of a hog heaven where directors would wallow in cash and be spared the tedious obligations that go with it. Now I can almost hear their grunts of anticipation.
Previous page
