Valentine’s Day saw US hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein’s Saba Capital Management notch up a seventh knockback in its campaign to oust the boards of seven UK investment trusts, including three run from Scotland, and take control of them.

Edinburgh Worldwide Investment Trust had declared, ahead of its shareholder vote on Mr Weinstein’s attempt to oust its directors and appoint two individuals selected by Saba to the board, Paul Kazarian and Jonathan Zucker, that it faced a “bigger battle” than other funds targeted because of its relatively high proportion of retail investors.

Ultimately, it prevailed on Friday, and by a significant margin, leaving Mr Weinstein with a full suite of defeats.

The fact that Saba was defeated at all, let alone by the significant margin that turned out to be the case in the votes at each of the seven trusts, is somewhat remarkable.

This is not because what it was proposing was in any way appealing.

Nothing emerged through the hedge fund’s campaign, for all of Saba’s attempts to portray itself as being on the side of the small investor, to suggest that its proposals had any merit for other shareholders in the investment trusts it targeted.

Rather, it has been impossible to shake the notion that Saba has, as you might expect of a hedge fund, been targeting short-term gain.

The reason the defeats are remarkable is that Saba had built very sizeable stakes in the seven trusts.

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This meant that, even if the vast bulk of other investors opposed what it was trying to do, they had to turn out and vote in very large numbers to defeat the hedge fund given Saba’s starting point.

Institutional investors are, naturally, generally much more switched on to voting in such situations.

However, investment trusts have very sizeable private shareholder bases.

It can be more difficult to get such individuals to vote at general meetings in any case - given for example many competing demands on their time - and particularly so if they hold their stakes through investment platforms which mean their connections with the trusts are more distant.

What has been striking indeed has been the success of the trust boards, with the help of the broader sector and Association of Investment Companies industry body, in encouraging shareholders to use their vote on the Saba proposals.

There were undoubtedly, and for very good reason, grave worries in the investment trust sector........

© Herald Scotland