The common practice of share buybacks is on the UK government’s agenda. In late January the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) announced that it is engaging PwC to conduct a study on potential abuses of buybacks as a new initiative in the broad package of corporate governance reforms that was announced by the government in August last year. A share buyback is not intrinsically flawed, nor is it a complex mechanism of financial engineering; it simply amounts to a company purchasing its own stock on the open market. This can be a legitimate tool for companies to manage their capital structure