British microchip giant Arm has decided to take its bumper listing to New York in part due to the damage done to the London market from leaving the EU.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hermann Hauser, the co-founder of the company, explained that the UK’s split with the European Union could have fundamentally damaged Britain’s reputation as a safe place to invest.
He said: “New York is a much deeper market than London and… because of Brexit idiocy, of course, the image of the London Stock Exchange has suffered a lot in the international community.”
Hauser said that the ability to raise large amounts of money on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) had been curtailed since Britain left the EU.
He said Arm could not raise the $10 billion (£8 billion) it was hoping to attract on the London market.
The company, whose microchip designs are used in billions of smartphones and other devices, was listed in London between 1998 and 2016, when it was bought by SoftBank for £24 billion.
But the company has decided to up sticks in favour of the US, spurning advances from Rishi Sunak to float in the UK.
According to Telegraph reports, officials had even offered to bend listing rules to attract the company.
It begs the question, is there anything they won’t bend the rules for?
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