Hopelessly incompetent and arrogant!
I am an investor in Pela Terra Farmland fund which STAG Fund Management is tasked with managing. The experience so far has been appalling, STAG is incompetent, arrogant and not qualified to be a fund manager.
Not once, but twice, our AGM has had to be postponed due to STAG´s failure to send out documents on time, sometimes receiving them only the day before. Even a child could organise themselves better! They have refused to apologize for this, even going as far as blocking the chat function at the AGM to prevent investors from showing dissent. This is sheer arrogance, and unacceptable censorship. Instead of engaging with complaints, STAG shuts investors down and tries to silence us. If STAG is concerned about criticism, it should do its job properly.
Our last AGM was a shambles anyway. STAG took well over an hour to hold just five votes.
STAG´s work is regularly slapdash, slipshod and slovenly, characterised by numerous careless mistakes including serious conceptual errors in presentations. I was given the wrong ISIN code for our fund by a STAG employee. A STAG presentation confused discount rates with growth rates, and they were using a ridiculously low 4.04% WACC (weighted average cost of capital) to value parts of the fund´s assets. A private equity fund cannot have a discount rate anywhere near as low. It is clear STAG has no clue what they are doing or talking about!
STAG is also leaving it all to the last minute, then rushing to meet an impossible deadline, brought about by their own chaos and disorganisation. STAG comes to the AGM unprepared and cannot answer our questions. Neither do they bother to follow up on them afterwards.
STAG´s employees are lawyers, masquerading as fund managers. Their biographies confirm there is little to no knowledge of finance or investments, or experience of dealing with investors, and this shows through. STAG struggles to understand what´s of relevance to investors and therefore puts a lot of extraneous material in documentation that is of no interest to us.
For years investors have been asking for a site visit of the farms in conjunction with the fund advisors, but this has never happened. There have been long periods of up to a year with no communication whatsoever about the fund or how its assets are performing.
STAG is failing to provide anything that comes close to being service as a fund manager. Our fund pays fees to STAG, and I don´t want STAG´s arrogance or incompetence even if they were free!
I have made a formal complaint about STAG´s behaviour and conduct to Portugal´s financial markets regulator, CMVM.