Saba Capital, the New York hedge fund run by Boaz Weinstein, is making its third attempt to seize control of Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust (ticker: USA), a FTSE 250 investment trust that has delivered annualised returns of 16.7% since its 2018 launch — placing it in the top 10% of all UK investment companies. The annual meeting is 23 October, and Saba wants three of its nominees on the board. Regular shareholders have rejected Saba twice already. They will need to do it again. The core absurdity of Saba's position is now visible to anyone paying attention. The fund demands a "100% cash exit at or near NAV" for all shareholders — framed as a liquidity event. But the USA board says it already offered Saba precisely that, and Saba declined. When the stated objective is rejected by the entity demanding it, the stated objective is not the real objective. The real play is likely control. Saba's nominees — one employee and two serial picks from Weinstein's various campaigns — cannot plausibly be called independent. The suspicion, shared widely among City brokers, is that a Saba-dominated board would appoint Saba itself as manager or fold USA into a Saba-managed vehicle. Notably, Saba's own US-listed funds trade at far wider discounts to net asset value than USA's relatively modest 3%. USA's portfolio is genuinely distinctive within the UK investment landscape. It holds stakes in Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe — acquired early, often while still private. These are not positions easily replicated by retail investors. Volatility comes with the territory of high-growth US tech, and the five-year stats look weaker than the since-launch numbers because the AI valuation surge in late 2022 created a tough comparison window. That is not a governance failure; it is how concentrated growth investing works. Broker Investec's assessment is blunt: "Saba offers no credible plan. Shareholders are being asked to give its nominees potential board control on the strength of a conditional, non-binding liquidity proposal, with no roadmap for the future manager, strategy or governance: vote first, then find out later what you've voted for." Panmure Liberum adds the structural warning: with Saba's near-30% stake plus 7.7% held by assumed sympathiser Sessa Capital, non-voting effectively hands Saba the win. The arithmetic is tight. Saba and Sessa together hold roughly 37.7%, meaning the remaining shareholders must actively vote in large numbers to block the nominees. For holders on platforms like Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, and Interactive Investor, the effective voting deadline may be as early as this Wednesday — days before the 23 October meeting. Platform providers should be flagging this urgently. The broader pattern is worth naming. Saba's repeated campaigns against UK investment trusts exploit a structural feature: the discount to NAV that closed-end funds sometimes carry. Weinstein positions it as shareholder advocacy; the mechanism is closer to corporate raiding with a governance wrapper. When the raider has already refused the exit it demands, and its nominees are employees and repeat agents, the extractive intent is barely disguised.
