After a strenuous few months battling activist investor Elliott Advisors, Katherine Garrett-Cox, chief executive of Alliance Trust, has won the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year award.
Ms Garrett-Cox has just finished a fight to maintain control of the trust after agreeing an 11th hour deal with its largest investor to install two new non-executive directors onto the trust’s board.
The move came just ahead of the trust’s annual general meeting in Dundee and saw two out of the three nominees that Elliott had suggested appointed to the board.
The deal came after Alliance Trust had spent some £3m fighting the approach.
Elliott Advisors, which holds 12 per cent of the trust, argued the trust has underperformed the market and Ms Garrett-Cox’s pay packet was too high.
