ONE of Britain’s leading share registrars has criticised the changes to company law proposed by the Government to protect the identity of British shareholders, a day after animal rights extremists targeted investors in GlaxoSmithKline.

John Roundhill, chairman of Britain’s main registrars’ association, said that the proposed reforms, which are due to be debated in the House of Lords today, would prove ineffective.

The proposed changes to Section 356 of the 1985 Companies Act are intended to make it harder for a third party to access the register of a company’s shareholders.

At the moment, anybody is free to request a copy of the shareholder register and the company is obliged to deliver it. If it does not, the individual may take the company to court.

Under the new proposals, the company is obliged to deliver the register only if the person requesting it can prove that they require the information for a “fit and proper” purpose.

Mr Roundhill said: “We would urge the Department for Trade and Industry to look at this clause again as we are concerned that there is no definition of ‘fit and proper’ purpose.”

Mr Roundhill is chairman of the registrars’ group of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, which represents 97 per cent of Britain’s shareholders. He said that it would be fairly easy for a person to give the impression that he intended to use the information for a “fit and proper” purpose but that it would be difficult to know whether this was true.

He is also concerned that the company has only five days to determine whether or not the case is “fit and proper”.

The reform will be debated in the House of Lords and is expected to be voted on in the next two weeks. After that, it will go through the Commons.

Mr Roundhill is director of the registrar’s group at Capita, the support services firm that operates London’s toll charge.

Shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline yesterday became the latest investors to be targeted by animal rights extremists. They initially targeted Huntingdon Life Sciences and have since intimidated staff at companies including Montpelier, the construction group that was building a new drugs research laboratory for Oxford University.

Shareholders in GlaxoSmithKline, Europe’s biggest pharmaceuticals maker, received letters from an animal rights group demanding that they sell their shares in the company or face having their names made public in the next 14 days.

The letters arrived, unsigned, on Monday morning. GSK has called in the police.

The unidentified group said that it had decided to target GSK’s “financial vulnerability” to force it to stop using Huntingdon Life Sciences and predicted that GSK’s shares would plummet.

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