In its fight to get three nominees elected to the board of Alliance Trust, 12% shareholder Elliott Advisors has launched a broadside against both its performance and the way it benchmarks this.

Elliott Advisors has complained that Alliance Trust compares the performance of its £3.5 billion portfolio to the MSCI All World index, which has a large exposure to struggling emerging market stocks. Against this benchmark, its perceived underperformance was only 5.7 percentage points between 2011 and 2014.