AGM Statement

At the Company's Annual General Meeting held on 24 April 2002, all resolutions
were duly passed. The resolutions passed under Special Business were as
follows:

  * The Directors' authority to allot a limited number of currently unissued
    ordinary shares for cash, without first offering such shares to existing
    ordinary shareholders pro-rata to their existing holdings, has been
    renewed.
   
  * The Company's authority to purchase up to 14,960,957 of its own shares for
    cancellation has been renewed. This represents approximately 14.99% of the
    number of ordinary shares in issue on 28 February 2002.
   
The Chairman made the following comments:

'Before I ask you for any questions that you may have concerning the Company,
its affairs and prospects and concerning Japan, its economy and stock markets,
I would like to make some general comments about the views of your Board of
Directors. Following the end of the formal proceedings of this Annual General
Meeting, Asako Kibe, our Investment Manager in Tokyo, will make a presentation
to you about Japan, its economy and stock markets and about the portfolio and
its prospects. I am sure that you will have some questions for her which she
will be pleased to answer at the time.

All of you will, I am sure, have read about the considerable difficulties that
face Japan and its economy at present. They all say much the same thing -
namely that Japan is still suffering from the aftermath of the stock market and
property bubbles of the late 1980's; they also say that reform is needed in
Japan in order to deal with these problems and that the government is very
reluctant to carry out the necessary reform. You will have read in particular
of the difficulties facing their banks with their large portfolios of bad debts
and facing their government with its large budget deficits. All these problems
are well publicised and have unquestionably had a detrimental effect on the
level of its stock markets. It is one of the reasons that our net asset value
is as low as it is.

It is the view of my colleagues and me that the publicity and commentary
surrounding Japan's economic problems does not tell the whole story. While the
government of Japan has unquestionably been slow to address some of the
country's problems, that does not mean that it has done nothing. A number of
important reforms have taken place which include lower tax rates, both
assistance and tougher regulation for the banks, new and better accounting
standards, and so on. But the real change that is taking place in Japan is at
the grass roots level and Asako Kibe will focus on this in her presentation.
There is no doubt that an increasingly large number of companies are sorting
out any problems that they have by themselves and without the aid of the
government or banks; an increasing number of companies focus more and more on
profitability, on proper returns on capital and attention to shareholder value;
there is a growing acceptance of the importance of corporate governance and its
accountability to shareholders.

My colleagues and I are of the belief that there is exists a number of good
investment opportunities in Japan - particularly amongst smaller companies.
Like most people, we are unable to predict whether the general level of the
stock market will rise or fall in the near future; what we do feel reasonably
confident about, however, is that - providing markets stabilise - stop going
down - then there is every chance that by investing in the shares of such
companies, our net asset value can rise. That is what we believed when we
recommended to you a year ago that you vote in favour of the continuation
proposal at last year's AGM; that remains the view of my colleagues and me -
one of guarded optimism. This year has so far got off to a good start with the
Nav for the year to date rising by 13% and the share price by 23%.'

Mr John Morrell retired as a director of the Company with effect from the end
of the Annual General Meeting.