Marsh ponders shell route

Brian Marsh OBE, the former Lloyd’s insurance underwriter who owns 58.5 per cent of AIM-quoted private equity investor B.P. Marsh & Partners, has outlined his ‘view from the bridge’ amid the perfect storm engulfing the financial services sector.

Piqued by an AIM non-cash assets discount of 50 per cent, he says his options are open. The company can continue as before, as ‘we have sufficient cash reserves’, convert its holdings into cash and become a shell ‘holding £45 million after tax’, or consider other ways to realise the value locked up in the group.

Unveiling recent interim figures, Marsh, who founded the business in 1990 with £2.5 million of his own cash before floating the emerging financial services backer in 2006, said its half-time net assets stood at £45.2 million or 154.4p per share. However, investors now shun financial services and B. P. Marsh’s

AIM value at 89.25p is a shrivelled £26 million, a discount to assets of more than 50 per cent before considering its £7.8 million cash.

‘We’re looking after our clutch of 12 eggs [investments], hatching them when we can, but the market seems to want us to migrate to cash’, opines Marsh, who set up the Marsh Christian Trust back in the 1980s with £75,000. He’ll be hoping investors become more charitable. Watch this space.