Gervais Williams on Diverse Income Trust Investment into Elegant Hotels Group plc

This morning Elegant Hotels Group plc LON:EHG announced that The Diverse Income Trust Plc LON:DIVI bought 3,240,544 Ordinary Shares or 3.65% in the Hotel Group.

DirectorsTalk Interviews caught up with Gervais Williams who manages a number of funds that aggregate to over £1bn, including the Diverse Income Trust plc to find out why he liked Elegant Hotels Group.

Gervais Williams told us ?We like Elegant Hotels as it is a business with lots of positive momentum having upgraded its offering with capex over the last three or four years. The full benefits of this are still to come through. And the valuation at issue was below the asset value of the hotels, and that itself might rise further with better trading. In addition the company is generating great cashflow and that is why the company can fund such a good dividend yield ? 7% at issue.?

Gervais Williams is also Managing Director at Miton Group plc LON:MGR, the independent listed fund management group that has a reputation for offering strategies that are distinctive from most others. His fund management career extends over nearly 30 years including 17 years with Gartmore Group Ltd, where he was head of UK Small Companies investing in UK smaller companies and Irish equities. He won Investor of the Year awarded by Grant Thornton at their Quoted Company Dinner in both 2009 and 2010. Gervais is a member of the AIM Advisory Council and a board member of the Quoted Companies Alliance. He is also on the EU Taskforce reviewing why the number of smaller IPOs has declined over recent decades. Gervais published his first book ?Slow Finance? in the autumn of 2011, and his second book ?The Future is Small? was published in November 2014. He was recently awarded Fund Manager of the Year 2014 by What Investment.