- Osmond makes major investment
- Wolfson sells more shares
- Next finance director also sells
As Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko says in the film Wall Street, money never sleeps, and it seems some of the UK’s most high-profile entrepreneurs were busy dealing over the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Hospitality veteran Hugh Osmond, whose CV includes floating Pizza Express and founding Punch Taverns, loaded up with shares in his latest venture Various Eateries (VARE:AIM) the day after Boxing Day.
Osmond, who recently described most of his staff as ‘Gen-Z snowflakes’ and says the new generation of work-starters ‘have a serious set of problems’ on a scale he hasn’t seen in 40 years of business, nonetheless ploughed over £10 million into the owner of Coppa Club, Noci and Tavolino, taking up 43.2 million shares at 25p each in its latest fundraising.
Alongside a placing of 40.4 million shares, which would have diluted anyone not subscribing by roughly 50%, the firm undertook a debt for equity swap for a £10.8 million bond held by Friends Provident, due to mature this April, and secured loans of around £600,000 held by TDR Capital and Anella Limited, a company owned and controlled by Osmond’s business partner Andy Bassadone.
Meanwhile, Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Leicester-based fashion and homewares retailer Next (NXT), took advantage of the positive market reaction to the firm’s latest trading update to offload more than £5 million of shares on 5 January 2024.
A day earlier, Next raised its profit forecast for the year to the end of January by £20 million to £905 million thanks to a better winter selling season and a ‘more benign’ outlook for retail spending.
Wolfson sold 60,000 shares at £84.30, and was joined the same day by outgoing finance director Amanda James who sold 13,000 shares at a slightly less favourable £83.93 but still netted more than £1 million.
The Next boss, who is one of the FTSE 100’s longest-serving chief executives, made the headlines in November 2020 after selling over £10 million of shares in order to ‘spread his investments into non-retail areas’ according to a company press release, while James sold around £380,000 worth of shares in August 2023.
Jonathan Blanchard, finance chief and chief operating officer of clothing brand Reiss, which is majority owned by Next, will join the group next month and takes over from James as finance director in July.
