Indivior is set to become the latest British-listed company to swap the Square Mile for Wall Street, with the FTSE 250 business confirming this morning that it will consult shareholders over a plan to move its primary listing this summer.
Indivior is a pharma company specializing in treating various types of addiction. If you’re in Britain, you may not have even heard of it. After all, more than 80% of its sales come from the US, its CEO is American, its headquarters are in Virginia and the authorities in Washington DC are a major customer.
Little surprise, then, that Indivior is set to become the latest British-listed company to swap the Square Mile for Wall Street, with the FTSE 250 business confirming this morning that it will consult shareholders over a plan to move its primary listing this summer.
They are unlikely to object.
The news added to a day of gray, rain-drenched gloom in the City of London, which is increasingly facing an exodus of listed companies. Bookmaker Flutter is also planning to switch to New York, following in the footsteps of building materials company CRH and plumbing business Ferguson. Package holiday provider Tui is off to Frankfurt, while other likely departures include a fintech called Kaspi. And of course there’s British chip-making champion Arm, which infamously snubbed London for the US last year.
So what to do? British politicians, regulators and other officials are still keenly trying to come up with ways of stemming the tide. To save you reading a zillion consultations, studies, committee reports, et cetera, this is loosely what they’ve suggested:
- Paying CEOs more (as suggested by former Cazenove chief Robert Pickering on this week’s In the City podcast, which is well worth a listen on Spotify and Apple)
- Slashing red tape for companies looking to float, such as the need to demonstrate a three-year “track record”
- Letting companies make more decisions without consulting shareholders
- Making it easier to have different classes of shares
- Combining “premium and standard” listings into one segment
- Reducing rules about what information has to be included in a prospectus when a company goes to market
- Encouraging more investment into UK equities by nudging pension funds or introducing a “UK ISA” for savers
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