Trust Principles chief: 'We'd intervene in editorial sale'

The Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company is armed with a single Founders Share which enables it to restrict any shareholder action which threatens the Trust Principles. The first of the five Principles, drafted in 1941 to protect Reuters, states that “Thomson Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group or faction”.

In an interview with The Baron, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, pictured, who heads the Founders Share Company, was asked how the Trustees would respond to an attempt to sell the editorial business. He replied: “If such a thing would happen my guess is that we would then use the powers that we have in our Founders Share to prevent such a sale. That, at least, would be my recommendation to the board and I have a very nice board who listen carefully to what the chairman says.”

He said the trustees had not accepted the Thomson family’s $17 billion bid  for Reuters in 2008 because they felt there was no alternative. “We could have said no, and then we would have been in the situation where Reuters would continue down the drain.”

David Ure, a former executive director of Reuters and strategic adviser to its board, said the takeover of Reuters by Thomson was no fire-sale to a fairy godmother.

“The sale to Thomson may well have been the right course of action in 2008. An agreed sale renewing the Principles which created a much bigger, more diverse information company may well have averted a number of potentially worse outcomes. We cannot know. It was not, however, a fire-sale to a fairy godmother which you would conclude from E-J’s remarks,” he wrote in a letter to The Baron.

Ure added: “Like nuclear weapons, some powers are best left implicit or potential and not used in anger. This has probably always been the case with the Founders Share Company powers. A well run, growing business is a much more important underpinning of their values.” ■