Standard Life are again at the centre of a carpetbagger attack, wanting the company to give up its mutual status and become a public limited company (Plc).
According to David Stonebanks, he has now received more than the minimum of 1,000 demutualisation request forms. He plans to obtain 1,500 forms and then pass them to Standard Life. Once the forms have all been verified (a maximum of 3 weeks is allowed for this), Standard must hold an extraordinary general meeting to consider the demutualisation. This meeting must take place within 3 months of the forms being verified.
Our View
As always, there are mixed views on the news for demutualisation. If all of the requests for demutualisation are verified then Standard Life will have no choice but to organise an EGM to put forward the demutualisation proposals.
Standard Life has been through this before and has not been forced to demutualise. However, with policyholder returns being so low, loyalty to the company is likely to have waned and this could mean them looking for money from a demutualisation.
The only problem here is that almost one fifth of policyholders gave up their right to any windfall payments.
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