Hill to join fight to demutualise Standard Life
Perth tycoon Danny Hill, who made millions from the float of insurer AMP, is considering throwing his financial weight behind fellow Australian Fred Woollard's campaign to demutualise European insurer Standard Life.
Perth tycoon Danny Hill, who made millions from the float of insurer AMP, is considering throwing his financial weight behind fellow Australian Fred Woollard's campaign to demutualise European insurer Standard Life.
Investor activist Woollard, who runs the Standard Life Members' Action Group, is soon to an-nounce the next move in his campaign to convert the mutual insurer, whose market value is es-timated at $A39 billion.
Most of the company's 2.3 million policies are held in the United Kingdom but any conversion would indirectly benefit thousands of Australian "mum-and-dad" investors with holdings in Standard Life through a PolicyLink fund which invests in British endowment policies.
Woollard worked for Hill as a fund manager and helped him with the push to convert AMP to a listed company in 1998, during which Hill reportedly made $A15 million buying policies for their share entitlements.
Hill told a Scottish newspaper this week he was thinking about entering the campaign and using some of his fortune to help his former colleague's push.
"I'm considering joining the campaign and if I do join it, I will put in as much money as it needs to make them accountable," he said, describing the Edinburgh-based insurer's refusal to allow a policy-holder vote on conversion as "scandalous".
"AMP tried the same trick with me and it didn't work."
Monaco-based Woollard, who has been running his campaign through the internet, last month failed in an attempt to force Standard Life to allow a vote on a float which would deliver an av-erage windfall of $A15,490 to policy-holders. Standard Life knocked back his proposal on a le-gal technicality but it failed to eject Woollard or his 89 supporters, leaving the way open for a further attempt.
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