Bill Ackman’s fund to quit Amsterdam after antisemitic violence

Bill Ackman’s London-listed hedge fund Pershing Square Holdings is to drop its listing in Amsterdam after the billionaire stockpicker expressed outrage over antisemitic violence in the Dutch capital in November.
PSH, a member of the FTSE 100 index of blue chips, announced an intention to delist from the Euronext market in Amsterdam on the grounds that it would reduce costs and regulatory complexity.
The statement made no mention of Ackman, its star manager and 23 per cent shareholder, who said on X last month that he was going to ask the board to ditch the listing for moral as well as financial reasons.
“Concentrating the listing on one exchange, the London Stock Exchange, and leaving a jurisdiction that fails to protect its tourists and minority populations combine both good business and moral principles,” he wrote on the social media platform at the time. “We can also save money and improve liquidity for shareholders to boot.”
The statement came after a night of violence in Amsterdam when supporters of the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv were attacked in hit-and-run incidents. Footage on social media showed fans beaten and run over by people chanting pro-Palestinian slogans. The Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof condemned the attacks as “unadulterated antisemitic violence”.
Pershing Square is a $10.4 billion hedge fund invested mainly in American stocks that is managed by Ackman from New York but began life as an entity listed in Amsterdam in 2014. It then added London as its second listing jurisdiction in 2017. Today around 90 per cent of the trades in PSH shares are routed through the London exchange.
PSH’s new chairman Rupert Morley said that following a review: “The board has concluded that the advantages of consolidating trading on the LSE, combined with the reduction of administrative and compliance burdens associated with maintaining a secondary listing in Amsterdam, now outweigh the benefits of retaining the Euronext listing.”
PSH “remains committed to delivering long-term shareholder value. The delisting does not change the company’s investment approach or governance principles,” the fund said. The delisting was subject to the approval of Euronext.
Ackman, a cheerleader for US president-elect Donald Trump, has been a vocal supporter of Israel and a critic of the authorities at Ivy League universities who he says have been too soft on antisemitism on campus, including his alma mater Harvard.
Two years ago he was seeking ways to drop the London listing and move it to New York as a way of narrowing the wide discount-to-net assets on which PSH trades and to market its shares to American retail investors. More recently he appears to have dropped that plan though an attempt this year to launch a Pershing-badged closed-end fund in the US, Pershing Square USA, flopped because of lack of investor demand.
Ackman is also pushing to ditch the Amsterdam listing of Universal Music Group, the label in which PSH is a major shareholder and whose board he sits on.
PSH has underperformed the S&P 500 index this year because of its underweighting in technology stocks and preference for consumer-facing businesses. It recently bought into Nike, the athletic apparel giant, and Brookfield, the real estate group.
PSH shares in London rose by 1.8 per cent to £38.98.