Aberdeen denies Gilbert is looking for buyer

According to The Financial Times, Aberdeen’s founder and chief executive Martin Gilbert has made informal approaches to several rivals over recent months as he looks to turn around the outflows and drop in profitability.

However, Gilbert has declined to comment on the FT report, which appears to have been based on a few unnamed sources who had requested anonymity, and a spokesperson for Aberdeen denied that anyone has been approached to buy the business.

The spokesman said: “In his 32 years running Aberdeen Asset Management, Martin Gilbert has never made a formal or informal approach to anyone about buying the business.”

One of the unnamed sources told the newspaper: “I have heard the rumours. Martin is of the age where he needs to find a successor, and there is no one within the business today.

“Aberdeen has a huge Asian equity market problem, a huge amount of outflows. They don’t want to wait that out for three years as there is probably only one direction it will go, and that is down.”

Private equity groups have been suggested as possible buyers, as well as investment banks such as Credit Suisse, which sold its asset management business to Aberdeen seven years ago.

But analysts at broker RBC Capital Markets were also quick to rubbish the claims.

In a note to investors, Peter Lenardos, managing director at RBC, acknowledged the firm was “in a weak position, hampered by ongoing net outflows that are having an adverse impact on profitability”. But he said a sale process “would be an admission of failure”.

He added: “We do not assign much credibility to this article.”