It has been decided that the Initial Public Offering of Liontrust ESG Trust PLC (ESGT) will not be proceeded with on 5 July due to the overall demand being insufficient to meet the minimum of £100 million set out in the Prospectus.
John Ions, Chief Executive of Liontrust, commented:
“The strength of interest from individual investors shows the potential there was of building ESGT over the next few years.
“Nearly 2,000 individual private investors demonstrated their confidence in the investment proposition, the long-term opportunities offered by ESGT and the track record of the Liontrust Sustainable Investment team. We are disappointed we won’t get the chance to repay their faith through an investment trust after everyone worked so hard to secure its launch.
“We received significant commitment from investors for ESGT post launch but not enough for the IPO. This reflects the challenging market conditions for fundraising for investment trusts.
“Therefore, we will continue to focus on building the open-ended funds run by the Sustainable Investment team, who were managing £10.24 billion, including £1.9 billion in open-ended SF Global Growth funds, as at 31 March 2021 compared to £2.5 billion on 1 April 2017.”
Peter Michaelis, Head of the Liontrust Sustainable Investment team, commented:
“In marketing ESGT, we were encouraged by the positive reaction to the unconstrained and high conviction portfolio and the plan for us to fund research into developing financial instruments for currently hard to invest in UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“We will take the ideas we had developed for ESGT and continue to apply them to our open-ended funds for which there is strong demand.”
