• NAV at the year end of 44.41p per share (2020: 46.35p), after dividend payments totalling 3.00p per share during the year
• Deployment of £6.91 million during the year, including new investments in 20 private and AIM quoted companies
The financial year to 28 February 2021 has been a period of significant challenge and uncertainty dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This public health crisis has had a wide-reaching impact across our society, and the Directors thoughts are with all of those who have been affected.
Despite the economic disruption experienced during the year, it is encouraging to report that your Company has continued to make positive progress, with NAV total return increasing to 144.32p per share. This reflects the strength and resilience of the investee portfolio, where most companies successfully adjusted their business models to enable them to continue to operate under the lockdown restrictions. Further progress
E-cigarettes and smoking among teenagers
A study published today in
BMC Public Health demonstrates a potentially harmful relationship between adolescents using e-cigarettes who then go on to smoke tobacco cigarettes. This behavior may undermine hard-won progress in tobacco control that have been largely delivered through preventing smoking initiation in youth. Author of the study, Jean Long, talks more about the research in this blog.
In 2013, the Tobacco Policy Review Group published
Tobacco Free Ireland, a report which set a target for Ireland to reduce smoking prevalence to less than 5% by 2025. The report identified tobacco-related harm reduction as a key issue for consideration. Since e-cigarettes’ launch in the European Union (EU) in 2006 and in the United States of America (USA) in 2007, research on their potential benefits in terms of tobacco-related harm reduction, and on the public health harms of e-cigarettes, has grown. The systematic evidence review reported in t
A European Commission report referencing the potential for electronic cigarettes to fall under pharmaceutical legislation has heated up the long-running debate over the health effects of these novel products.
1. Net debt is the total value of loan notes, loans (including notional exposure to CFDs and Total Return Swap) less cash as a proportion of net asset value. 2. Dividends per share are the dividends in respect of the financial year ended 31 March 2021. An interim dividend of 5.20p was paid in January 2021. A final dividend of 9.00p (2020: 8.80p) will be paid on 4 August 2021 to shareholders on the register on 18 June 2021. 3. The NAV Total Return for the year is calculated by reinvesting the dividends in the assets of the Company from the relevant ex-dividend date. Dividends are deemed to be reinvested on the ex-dividend date as this is the protocol used by the Company s benchmark and other indices.
06 May 2021
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The recent assessment by the EU s scientific body, the Joint Research Centre, that nuclear energy does no more harm to human health or the environment than any other power-producing technology considered to be sustainable may be a sign of the green stamp of approval needed for the inclusion of nuclear in the EU Taxonomy on sustainable finance, write Elina Teplinsky, Vincent Zabielski and Victoria Judd, partner, special counsel and counsel, at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP.
Victoria Judd, Elina Teplinsky and Vincent Zabielski (Image: Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP) The EU Taxonomy Regulation, a system that classifies economic activities as environmentally sustainable to help the EU meet its Green Deal objectives, has emerged as an increasingly complex and politically fraught framework despite what should be a science-based approach to climate change mitigation.