CIAM mentioned in the information report on shareholder activism by the French National Assembly's Finance Committee
October 2, 2019
The French National Assembly's Finance, General Economy and Budgetary Control Committee, through its rapporteurs Eric Woerth and Benjamin Dirx, has drafted a report on shareholder activism.
In this report, CIAM is quoted no less than twenty-three times; for example in the paragraph below:"Activism remains for the moment a rather limited phenomenon in France
The phenomenon remains largely Anglo-Saxon, both in terms of the nationality of the companies targeted and the nationality of the funds conducting these campaigns.
There are thus few French activist funds. In this respect, the French investment fund CIAM remains rather an exception.
The few activist campaigns, less than a dozen, that have been conducted in France in recent years are mostly described below. They have, however, received a great deal of media attention.Elena Duré, a member of Activist Insight, puts forward several explanations in a report on activism in Europe in 2018. Quoting CIAM's co-chair, she suggests that French culture may prove to be a barrier for activists, with the persistence of a certain solidarity between managers and board members."
The report also provides a description of CIAM:
Charity Investment Asset Management (CIAM) is a fund that invests in listed securities. It was founded in 2010 by Anne Sophie d'Andlau and Catherine Berjal and has offices in Paris and London. The main investors in CIAM are asset management firms, institutional investors and banks. As of March 2019, CIAM claims an annualized return of 11% since 2013 and €600 million in assets under management.
The fund invests in companies of all sizes with no particular sector focus. CIAM's strategy is to "identify companies with governance failures that have a detrimental effect on share value. Its objective is to generate returns uncorrelated with financial markets by "unlocking value" in the targeted companies.
CIAM's intervention in Disney has given it a certain visibility. The fund intervened in Disney's purchase of minority shares in its subsidiary Euro Disney, by launching litigation to encourage the Disney group to raise the value of the purchase offer, believing that it had been undervalued due to "colossal intra-group transfers"
