FOOTNOTES
HILARY JOFFE: Old Mutual’s ‘christening and funeral’ tough on executives
When Old Mutual plc is finally split up into its component parts by the end of 2018, putting "the right assets into the hands of the right people", as CEO Bruce Hemphill puts it, it might be time for a case study to be written on a highly unusual and complex corporate process. Following what was expected to be the group’s final annual general meeting as a London-based, publicly listed company, Hemphill muses that the team managing the break-up process doesn’t necessarily know what the company got up to over the past 20 years. So as it prepares for the two new listings, in London and Johannesburg, that will put its two underlying core businesses directly into the hands of shareholders, issues have emerged at the last minute to complicate the process. These include the claim launched recently in the US courts relating to a business Old Mutual sold years ago. But ask Hemphill what has been the hardest part of the managed separation process he launched just more than two years ago, and ...
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