Northern Rock was no-one's fault

Here’s the snippet from NR’s trading statement issued the other day announcing that there would be no legal action against either former directors or the auditors.

“A review of the conduct of the previous Board in respect of funding and liquidity has been undertaken with the assistance of external advisors, Freshfields and KPMG Forensic. The Board has concluded that there are insufficient grounds to proceed with any legal action for negligence against the former Directors, and has no intention of bringing any such action. The Board has also completed a similar review in respect of the Company’s auditors and has determined that no action is warranted.”

Of course, one can make the argument, as Applegarth did, that the events that floored NR were unforeseeable. In addition I’ve never really bought the argument that the auditors were at fault - yes they earned money from work on securitization, but what exactly does that make them responsible for? And more broadly I’m a subscriber to the “s**t happens” school of thinking. Just because something has gone wrong/failed doesn’t necessarily mean someone is to blame. But somehow it seems an odd conclusion the issue, and Unite don't like it.

Maybe it’s the Government’s fault…?

Unite on FSA & Northern Rock

Not sure it says a lot?

Unite reaction to FSA report on Northern Rock
26/03/2008

Graham Goddard, Unite Deputy General Secretary said: "The failures which resulted in the crisis in Northern Rock mean that some 2,000 jobs will be lost at the bank. Unite recognises that the FSA has accepted their responsibility in relation to their monitoring of the bank. We are calling on the FSA to ensure that their supervision practices are strengthened so there can be no repeat of the mistakes that occurred in Northern Rock.

"Unite wants to see a full investigation into the events which lead to the troubles of the Newcastle based bank. This enquiry must take a broad perspective of all those involved, including the previous management of the company. The hard working staff at Northern Rock deserve to know what went wrong and that lessons will be learnt.

"At a time of massive uncertainty for employees in the financial services sector it is vital that the Government and the FSA are able to demonstrate that those who contributed to the failure of Northern Rock are held to account. Unite cannot accept that anyone whose actions contributed to the problems in the bank are able to walk away without any questions being asked of their conduct. We will be pressing for a full investigation."

Eddie George and Northern Rock

Still up at NAPF... Yesterday started with an interesting session - a speech by the former Governor of the Bank of England. Though it was politically diplomatic (he easily dodged some loaded questions) it was illuminating stuff. A few bits stuck in my mind. One was his admission that he didn't really understand how a lot of the new instruments (CDOs etc) that have caused so much damage lately actually worked. If he doesn't get it, that makes you worry. Leading on from that he said that no-one to his knowledge had predicted the type of problems we have faced, such as credit markets freezing up.

Most interesting for me were his comments about Northern Rock. Although he said the regulators needed to learn from the example, he was sceptical that the FSA could have stepped in earlier. He said that would suggest that the FSA was able to spot a future problem before the directors of the company could. And leading on he said the primary responsibility for the crisis therefore laid with the board of directors.

No doubt those that want to see the NR crisis as the fault of regulatory regime will read this him defending his old turf. I take the view that he was simply being straight up. People are not perfect and cannot know the future. Too much of the reaction to Northern Rock has involved people spotting what was 'obviously' wrong (and therefore could have been dealt with) with the enormous benefit of hindsight.

Public backs Darling over Northern Rock

Interesting poll in The Times showing that the punters (broadly) think the Government was right to nationalise Northern Rock, and a majority also don't think Alistair Darling should resign. Full story here. Notably Labour is also back in the lead in terms of the public's view of which party is best placed to handle the economy.

Although polls are notoriously volatile this is encouraging stuff for Labour, and reinforces the point that the Tories seem to have fluffed this one. The Pink Un in particular is unimpressed with the Dark Side and has openly criticised George Osborne's main line of attack this week:

"anybody who suggests that the Labour government has gone back to 1970s socialism deserves ridicule"

And yesterday it ran a piece suggesting that the Tory have "a basic misunderstanding of how securitisations worked", after they attempted to ramp up the scaremongering about Granite. Boy George has also been given a monstering by Simon Heffer (I feel nauseous just writing that!). Whilst I would normally interpret this as a good thing for the Cameroons, in this case I think he has a bit of a point.

It used to be the case that the Tories and their supporters would try and overplay a Labour mess-up or controversial policy by decsribing it as "Labour's poll tax". These days you are more likely to hear about "Labour's Black Wednesday". (We are apparently unable to understand current events unless we are given a historical comparison). However if it's a strange "crisis" for the Government that sees the public largely behind it, and the opposition given a pasting for politicking.

Not such a bad week for Labour afterall.

Northern Rock & self-investment

Just a quickie, but Punter Southall have rather cheekily pointed out that the Northern Rock pension scheme would fall foul of self-investment rules in another context. From memory pension funds are limited to investing 5% of their assets in securities issued by the sponsoring employer. The NR scheme recently moved its asset allocation to include a 93% weighting to gilts. Well, the sponsoring employer will very shortly be the Government, which issues gilts...

Northern Rock: have the Tories fumbled the ball?

Let's get one thing out of the way first of all. Rightly or wrongly, the Northern Rock saga has damaged the Government's reputation, and no-one is seriously claiming otherwise. But I do wonder whether the Tories' decision to take an opportunistic approach, and not support the move to nationalise the bank, combined with their "back to the 1970s" rhetoric is a rather large mistake.

For one, there have been plenty of sensible, non-Labour voices calling for nationalisation for some time. It's not a 'left-wing' or 'Old Labour' response to the problem in any sense. As such the argument that it represents a return to the 1970s shows that people using it either don't know what they are talking about or are being deliberately devious. As the FT has pointed out there were broadly similar banks rescues under the Tories in the 80s, and it is a tactic used elsewhere in the world. Add to that the Government's obvious desite to avoid public ownership if possible and it's obvious to anyone that this is nothing like British Leyland. I think the Tory line on this just comes across as dishonest.

And who exactly are the Tories trying to woo by saying they will oppose nationalisation and would rather let the bank go into administration? Superficially the anti-nationalisation bit might look like a pitch to the shareholders but a) a quick read of the business pages shows everyone thinks current NR shareholders were taking a risk and now that risk has turned out bad that is their problem and b) more importantly if NR goes into admininstration the shareholders might not get anything. Maybe it's supposed to demonstrate the Tories' free market credentials but, as Labour's stumbling but correct response demonstrates, this is a real problem that needs solving, it's not a test of ideological fidelity.

If anyone has come out of this well it's probably Vincent Cable. Regardless of what you might think of him I suspect that punters will think he is someone who has been saying broadly the same thing all the way through, and has been willing to give the Government a bit of credit when they have done the right thing. So it wasn't surpising to see him stick the boot into the Tories for their politicking yesterday. In contrast Osborne came across as a sort of anti-Pangloss - everything is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. It might rally the troops but it looks a bit, well, juvenile given the importance of the issue. I think maybe, just maybe, the Tories have managed to do themselves some damage.

Dumbest quote on Northern Rock nationalisation so far

From the UK Shareholders Association according to the Torygraph:

"It seems the only reason that the Government has chosen nationalisation is because 'it offers better value to the taxpayers'. This is equivalent to a thief telling you it offers better value to him to steal from you, than to enter into a commercial transaction with you."

The scenario is bit more complicated than that. In this case the thing you own only has value because the 'thief' is providing funding to a bigger entity of which the thing you own is notionally a part. If the 'thief' pulled his funding the thing you own may have no value at all.

Treasury select committee report on Northern Rock

This is seriously worth a read. If you want to cut through a lot of the guff that has been talked about Northern Rock this is a really good way to do it. Downlaod the report here. It pulls together written and oral evidence from all the key players (the management, Bank of England, FSA, market participants) and does a good job of describing what happened, when and (to some extent) why. There are loads of interesting insights from a variety of sources, many of which are enlightening (to me anyway).

The FSA gets an absolute pounding, and is accused of systematic failures. The BoE gets off more lightly, though it is clear that the committee is sceptical of the Governor's initial stance of making the avoidance of moral hazard a top priority. There is also a very interesting bit where the Governor challenges the idea that he should have been quicker to provide liquidity, especially given the action of other central banks.

"One of the points most people fail to understand … is that the European Central Bank has not increased the amount of liquidity at all since the beginning of August. It has redirected some of the liquidity that it would have done at one-week term to three-month term, but the total amount of liquidity that it extends to the banking system is absolutely the same now as it was in June and July before the turmoil began in August. That is not readily understood by many people. The amount of liquidity that we are extending to the banking system is almost 30% higher. I do not put enormous weight on that. I think what we have is a system, which I prefer, in which the banks can choose their own reserves targets. If they say they would like to hold more reserves with the Bank of England we readily supply it on demand. That is why we are supplying 30% more now than we were. Equally, the Federal Reserve has not raised the total amount of liquidity very much. There is a certain myth in all this that goes around and we take our share of the responsibility for not explaining it properly, but it is not easy to get across these points."

Equally the appears to committee accept that a further injection of liquidity by the BoE was unlikely to have been able to save Northern Rock, nor would it have necessarily been good for the market:

"We cannot know whether an open market liquidity operation of the kind asked for by a number of banks in August would have prevented Northern Rock’s need for emergency support from the Bank of England in September. It is most unlikely that any such lending operation in September, following the stigmatisation of Barclays which we deal with later, could have been of a sufficient scale to ensure that Northern Rock could have received the liquidity it then required. Such an operation would also have raised severe ‘moral hazard’ concerns, signalling to the banking sector as a whole that public sector support would be made available in the event of any bank facing distress."

Finally and most importantly the report is clear that the primary responsibility for the crisis that hit Northern Rock lies with the company's management. That this needs restating says a great deal about how these issues are presented by both the financial sector and repeated by some business journos.

Why the board got it wrong is probably worthy of a report by itself. Although the business strategy was clearly risky, they could have covered themselves by, for instance, taking out more insurance which would have given them access to long-term loans (something actual sub-prime lenders like Countrywide did). As I have posted before, they also believed that credits markets freezing simultaneously was 'unforseeable', but that's perhaps why they ought to have planned for such a Black Swan. At the end of the day it was their responsibility.

Here's what the report says:

"The high-risk, reckless business strategy of Northern Rock, with its reliance on short- and medium-term wholesale funding and an absence of sufficient insurance and a failure to arrange standby facility or cover that risk, meant that it was unable to cope with the liquidity pressures placed upon it by the freezing of international capital markets in August 2007. Given that the formulation of that strategy was a fundamental role of the Board of Northern Rock, overseen by some directors who had been there since its demutualisation, the failure of that strategy must also be attributed to the Board."

Northern Rock & the Telegraph

Yesterday's Northern Rock EGM provided a bit of corporate theatre, as two hedge funds had filed a number of shareholder resolutions. They also used the opportunity to lay into who they thought was to blame for the NR crisis... the Bank of England. According to the Telegraph:

Mr Wood called for Mr King not to be reappointed for a second term, a decision on which is expected in the next few weeks.

He said: "It was his faul... when Northern Rock went to borrow from the lender of last resort facility, they were told: 'No, you can't'. They forced Northern Rock to be shamed and publicly named, and of course, people wanted to take their money out."

"On one day alone recently, €500bn (£377bn) was borrowed from the European Central Bank by over 400 banks. So why should Northern Rock suffer? All Mervyn King had to do was what everyone else did."

Philip Richards, though resisting any personal attacks on Mr King, added: "To say there is a moral case for nationalisation is perverse after it was borne out of a mishandling of the crisis by the Bank of England."

I actually think this is a bit of blather. The hedge funds took a punt and got it wrong. With the threat of nationalisation looming and no idea what price the shares might be acquired for they can't afford to wind the Government up by blaming Darling etc, hence the BoE makes an alternative target.

Actually the Telegraph business comment nails this one quite fairly -

That is what risk capital is all about. Investors in Northern Rock backed a company with a flawed business model. It was a gamble that didn't pay off, just as the hedge funds' later punt has not.

That doesn't stop my personal favourite columnist Jeff Randall from blundering in. Today he says that CSFB analyst Jonathan Pierce was one Cityboy who spotted that the Rock was a crock -

All last year, CSFB was urging clients to sell the Rock's shares. As the price went down and down, Pierce simply reiterated his negative stance. He is one of only a few to emerge from this fiasco with an enhanced rating.

Get that - one of only a few to spot the problem before it happened. I wholeheartedly agree that most missed it, it's just that a previous column in the Telegraph business section last November suggested that City did all it could in respect of NR to signal there was a problem, and had been doing so from the start of 2007. (Although strangely voting at NR's AGM in April suggested that the City was giving the bank the thumbs up).

At the start of the year, the stock market began signalling that the company was in trouble: from a peak of £12.50, its share price halved and then halved again. Short of setting off an air-raid siren, it's hard to see what more the City could have done.

No prizes for guessing the author.

Hermes on Northern Rock

Just a quickie. Some interesting comments from David Pitt Watson of Hermes in this report. I liked this bit:

"Take Northern Rock for example, how many fund managers had conversations with board directors about Northern Rock about the risks it was running; how many asked to speak to their non-executive directors? All these sorts of responsibility issues are the ones that pension funds should be asking their fund managers about."

He's absolutely right of course, but have any trustees been asking these questions? Fund managers these days all claim to take corporate governance and ownership responsibilities very seriously. So what were they doing in relation to Northern Rock? All you have to do is ask...

Unite reaction to Virgin named as favourite buyer by Northern Rock

Just a lift from the Unite website:

Graham Godard, Unite Deputy General Secretary said: “We will be meeting with Northern Rock tomorrow afternoon to seek confirmation on the full details of the deal. We are glad the speculation is over but will be looking for all the reassurances we've been demanding. The company are due to sign the Charter that Unite set out last week but at the moment it looks like they are already ticking some of the boxes including job security and a UK successor. On the surface this appears to be a positive move.”

-Ends-

For further information please contact Jody Whitehill 020 7420 8938 or 07768 693956

Unite Charter for Northern Rock and Future Stakeholders

Recognition of Unite as a stakeholder in the future of Northern Rock
To ensure the long term job security for the employees of Northern Rock
To protect and improve terms of employment for employees
To protect the existing pension arrangements
To continue the work of the Northern Rock Foundation
To retain Northern Rock as a UK listed company.

Sunday's news...

A couple of bits and bobs from the business pages today, and then some more blurb on private equity. On the Northern Rock front it looks like Warren Buffet might be about to make an appearance, lining up behind the private equity bid by the looks of it too. Also in the Torygraph is an interview with Richard Lambert, head of the CBI and former editor of the FT. He has a few interesting things to say. He argues that although the economic situation is looking rough at the moment, it's not a patch on the 70s, though that is not much comfort. And his comments on Northern Rock situation are worth a read:

"There are no good solutions, merely least bad solutions."

Which reminds me of JK Galbraith's famous line:

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

Over on The Observer there is a half-decent interview with Sir David Walker about his recent review of transparency in the private equity industry. I agree a bit with some of things he says. This is a bit of a step forward, and it is being watched by other countries. However I think his argument in defence of not requiring private equity partners to disclose details of their pay is weak:

"[D]irectors' pay in public companies is there to protect owners; to stop managers ripping off the shareholders and feathering their nests. A typical FTSE 100 company has around 150,000 shareholders, so the only realistic way to make that information available to all the owners is to publish it. In private equity there are typically only 150 owners and they have a total flow of information, so you don't need to make it publicly available."

I think this is a false distinction between public and private companies for a number of reasons.

First, the disclosure of exec pay in public companies is not simply an argument about addressing agency problems, it is part of a much wider debate about relative rewards within society. I think one of the reasons that there is still much debate about exec pay in the UK is that seeking to 'solve' or at least take the sting out of the issue by locating responsibility for exec pay in the company-shareholder relationship has, to be honest, failed.

Second, the issue of disclosure of pay in public companies demonstrates that making information widely available can help address the failings of a shareholder-driven approach. In the case of one big pay vote this year that I am aware of corporate governance watchers on the investor side were actually alerted to something by the press. If the info in private equity firms is only disclosed to limited partners there is no scope for the press to play such a role.

Thirdly, as explored in my post on Friday about agency problems, LPs are actually in a very weak bargaining position with private equity houses presently. I wonder if there has ever been a case of LPs telling GPs they need to pay themselves less?

Notably Walker is also positive about his call for the BVCA to produce better data on PE's economic impact as he says "I believe private equity is very positive for the UK economy". Funnily enough an academic I spoke to last week who has looked at quite a bit of the evidence to date, and has no particular axe to grind, reckoned that any serious analysis of the impact on employment would probably show a small negative one. Either way it has to be a good thing that more serious data is made available.

To finish off, we need to be aware of how studies of PE might seem to suggest things that aren't really there. For example, if a company sheds jobs following a PE takeover is that because of the nature of ownership, or because it was in trouble anyway? Studies seem to show that management buy-ins (ie new management coming in from outside) have a greater negative impact on jobs. But PE firms wil argue that if it is an MBI (rather than existing management buying out) that suggests that there was a problem there already.

Flip it around and you see the problem with some of the happy-clappy talk about PE as a job creator (see the Torygraph business comment pages for most of this year for examples). But a lot of the high-profile PE activity recently has been leveraged buyouts of large, successful companies. If they continue to expand and create jobs is that because of PE, or did PE just ride on the coat-tails of a decent existing business?

Which brings me back to the point about attribution analysis that I flagged up in my previous post about Walker. The more I think about it the more I think that this is the real missed opportunity of the Walker Review (if you accept that it was never going to address the real issues that TUs have with PE). By letting PE firms not disclose this (which I understand is commercially sensitive) it will allow them to argue that they achieve their returns through better management - whether this is true or not.

A push for disclosure of this info would also line up with investor concerns about PE since if it is gearing that is really driving returns then they are surely unsustainable. So how about it?

Financial pollution

I've been reading some of the business commentary around the Northern Rock collapse with an increasing sense of recent history being rewritten. On the same theme I have also had two or three discussions lately with people who clearly seem to think that was has happened to NR was a) obviously going to happen and b) therefore the fault of the FSA and/or BoE and/or the Government.

In response to point a) I would refer people back to what the company itself was saying even back in the summer. On 25th July it issued this interim results statement based on the six months to the end of June. Although it warned about the tightening credit situation, it was a very upbeat assessment, and even talked about a planned share buyback (would be a pretty cheap exercise now eh?!).

The final line of commentary from the chief exec Adam Applegarth was pretty clear:

"The medium term outlook for the Company is very positive."

In response to point b) whilst I accept that the type and speed of the interventions of various parties may have changed the nature of the NR crisis, there would still be a crisis because the company's business model will still have come unstuck. Unless someone does a serious counterfactual analysis of the NR crisis we can't really say how different it could have been (and in any case such an analysis might support the regulators). But in any case to suggest that the crisis is somehow primarily the fault of the authorities for failing to prevent the implosion is, in my view, massively mistaken.

The best comparable example I can think of is blaming the Environment Agency because a company has been responsible for massive pollution. Clearly the Agency has a responsibility for trying to stop companies from polluting, particularly because serious examples (like in the case of NR) affect the environment that everyone else has to inhabit, and we all end up paying for the clean-up work. But in no sense does this absolve the primary responsibility of the company and its directors.

I'll finish with a quote from Howard Davis in a review of Alan Greenspan's recent book Age of Turbulence:

"[Greenspan’s] vision is a useful corrective to the prevailing view that if a financial firm runs into trouble as a result of a flawed strategy it is the regulators and the central bank who are primarily responsible, and must be held to account, rather than the management and counterparties who devised and facilitated the strategy."

Shareholder voting at Northern Rock's AGM

Quick update to this list as I have managed to find a couple more voting decisions - Baillie Gifford and Hermes. See previous post for the background to this.



Baillie Gifford (page 25 & 26 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

BGI (page 22 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Co-operative Insurance (this links you to their voting search engine)
Remuneration report - Abstain
Auditor appointment - For

F&C (page 1057 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Fidelity (page 222 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Henderson
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For
(presumed, as exception-only reporting and no disclosure to the contrary)

Hermes
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

M&G (page 84 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Royal London (you'll need to download the PDF if you really want to check)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Standard Life
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For
(presumed, as exception-only reporting and no disclosure to the contrary)

Rock head rolls

Just a quickie. The first casualty at Northern Rock is chair Matt Ridley who resigned today. According to the Beeb:

Mr Ridley told the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday, that the bank had been hit by "wholly unexpected" events and he defended the way he and his colleagues had been running the bank.

"We were subject to a completely unprecedented and unpredictable closure of the world credit markets," he said.

He was accused of "damaging the good name of British banking" by the committee of MPs.

Northern Rock, the Beeb and the Black Swan

There's a very interesting report on the BBC website of the grilling of Northern Rock's executive team by the Treasury Select Committee. There are two things that I like about the report. The first is the fantastic attempt by the Northern Rock team to blame the run on the bank on the BBC. Get a load of this:

[Chief exec Adam Applegarth] told the Treasury Select Committee that the BBC was partly to blame for last month's run on the bank.

He blamed it for revealing the Bank of England's emergency loan to the bank.

"What severely hammered us was the retail run," said Mr Applegarth.

He said the BBC's exclusive report on 13 September, that the bank would need to seek emergency funding from the Bank of England, had scared his customers.

"It caused us immense difficulties," he said.

He revealed that the bank and the authorities had planned to announce the emergency loan the following Monday, which they hoped would have led to less panic.

The implication here is that the punters wouldn't have panicked if the info that NR had to go to the Bank of England as lender of last resort had been disclosed by the company, rather than the BBC, and at a time of its choosing. Whilst there might be a grain of truth in the idea that 'leaked' info seems more powerful than 'official' info, this leads down the path of imposing an almost war-time sense of responsibility on the reporting of financial stories. And in any case, if the execs can't predict the future - see below - how can a financial journo expect to know the impact of their story? In my own experience, stories I expected to get followed up sometimes got ignored, whereas reports I considered pretty dull (or at least 'obvious') sometimes made a splash.

Update: Robert Peston (who broke the story) has defended his decision on his blog on the Beeb site here.

The second point about the report is more interesting. Applegarth & crew argue that what happened was unprecedented (ie the freezing up of the credit markets) and that they had no way of knowing it would happen. As such they don't think they could have done anything any differently.

[The execs] explained that they had planned how to cope with certain possible problems, such as a 40% fall in house prices, but had not planned how to respond if its ability to borrow in the financial markets dried up.

"What wasn't stress-tested was the event deemed implausible - of the global markets freezing up overnight," said Mr Applegarth.

"The rapid and long-lasting closure of the global markets was not stress-tested," he added.

He said the bank had in fact started in March to slow down its lending.

But asked if he could have taken any action to mitigate the fundamental risk of the Northern Rock's business model, he replied, "No."

Well, bloody hell, isn't this a classic example of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan theory in practice? The Wiki definition could have been written about NR! And Taleb's argument that you should plan for the unexpected high-impact events rings very true.

Although there might be problems in the regulatory/oversight regime applying to banks (ie split of functions between FSA & BoE etc) it seems pretty clear that the NR board are the ones at fault. The didn't plan for the unexpected.

How shareholders voted at Northern Rock's AGM in April

I’ve tweaked and reposted this piece as I’m getting a bit twitchy about some of my traffic... And just to make it absolutely clear - this is a personal blog, and does not reflect any person or organization’s views other than my own.

Anyway, inspired by this post on the Snowflake5 blog, I thought I would have a trawl around for institutional investors' voting records at Northern Rock's AGM in April this year.

To be clear from the outset, there is no smoking gun in all of this. Just because shareholders didn't vote against a given proposal doesn't mean that they are in any way complicit, nor is there any evidence that shareholder engagement would have prevented any of the damage that has been done. Northern Rock ran into trouble because its business model was based on borrowing from the market, so when the credit crunch hit home they were going to be in trouble whatever happened.

However, it is worth noting that the board was awarded big salary increases at a time when they must have had some idea that the situation was becoming dangerous. In addition some shareholders might have wanted to look at the role of the auditor, as they made more money from non-audit work (including securitisation) than the audit itself.

So what about the actual votes? Well, I preface this with my usual moan that the state of voting disclosure in the UK is poor, despite the industry's claims to the contrary. I have only been able to find 8 records which are listed below, including decisions.

Note too that because a number of institutions only disclose by exception (ie they only tell you when they vote against management or abstain) we have to take it that a failure to report on Northern Rock means that they didn't vote against anything. Tiresome to say the least!

Here is the limited info I could find:

BGI (page 22 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Co-operative Insurance (this links you to their voting search engine)
Remuneration report - Abstain
Auditor appointment - For

F&C (page 1057 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Fidelity (page 222 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Henderson
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For
(presumed, as exception-only reporting and no disclosure to the contrary)

M&G (page 84 of report)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Royal London (you'll need to download the PDF if you really want to check)
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For

Standard Life
Remuneration report - For
Auditor appointment - For
(presumed, as exception-only reporting and no disclosure to the contrary)