Hargreave Hale AIM VCT has appointed Duncan Neale as an independent non-executive director. The venture capital trust announced the appointment on 30 September 2026, with effect from the first of the following month.
Neale is a chartered accountant who qualified at PricewaterhouseCoopers in London and has since held chief financial officer roles at both listed and private companies.
A board seat shaped by energy and small company finance
His other current directorships point to where his recent experience sits. He has served on the board of Gresham House Energy Storage Fund since August 2018, and he joined H-Power, the company formerly known as AFC Energy, in August 2023. He was also a director of Atrato Onsite Energy between April 2023 and December 2024.
That is a concentration in listed energy and infrastructure vehicles rather than a general portfolio of non-executive seats, and it brings a specific kind of knowledge to an alternative investment market trust: familiarity with how smaller quoted companies raise money, how their boards handle dilution, and how the market prices a business that is still some distance from consistent cash generation.
What a venture capital trust board does
The role is a governance one rather than a stock picking one. A venture capital trust board oversees an external investment manager, in this case Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management, and is responsible for the trust's compliance with the venture capital trust rules, its dividend policy, its discount management and the terms on which it raises new money from retail investors.
A finance specialist is the usual addition to such a board, and the accounting background is the qualification that matters most. Venture capital trusts hold large positions in illiquid, thinly traded alternative investment market companies, so the valuation question is continuous rather than annual, and the audit and valuation oversight falls to directors who can read the underlying numbers rather than accept the manager's mark.
Timing within the trust's year
The appointment lands at the start of the trust's financial year, which ends on 30 September. Neale therefore joins with a full reporting cycle ahead of him, and the first annual report to carry his name will cover a period he has served in full rather than a partial year. For a non-executive joining a listed vehicle, that is a cleaner starting point than mid-year arrival, and it means his first set of accounts will be a fair test of the contribution he makes.
Neale is also a trustee of the Cambodian Children's Fund in the United Kingdom.
