It’s been a blockbuster week for company bosses selling their shares with a number of big deals over the past seven days.
The biggest involves Tim Martin, the chairman of pub group JD Wetherspoon (JDW) who cashed in £50 million worth of shares, selling 4.37 million of them at £11.50 each.
Martin has reduced his stake in the business from 25.2% to just under 21.9%, worth around £330 million. Wetherspoon said the sale was in response to ‘significant buying interest’ following the company’s placing last week.
Martin has agreed to a lock up arrangement on his remaining shareholding and not sell any more shares until September when the company’s full year results to 25 July are released.
The sale is Martin’s second in the space of two months after he sold around £5 million worth of shares at £11.66 each in December. This followed another £5 million sale in July at a price of 984p each.
It comes after Wetherspoon's raise of around £92 million last week by selling 8.4 million new shares at between £11 and £11.20 - a discount to the day before closing price of £11.80.
Some of the money will go towards buying new pubs, which it expects to produce higher returns when the hospitality sector is allowed to reopen.
SOFTCAT BOSS SELLS £17 MILLION STAKE
Meanwhile Softcat (SCT) chair Martin Hellawell, together with associates Mandy Hellawell and the Highgate Family Trust and Bloomfield Charitable Trust, has sold 1.1 million shares in the IT services provider this week, mostly at £15.20 per share, in a series of transactions totaling around £17 million.
The deal is the largest Hellawell has made in over a year, following a £10 million sale at a price of £10.46 each in November 2019.
The company’s shares are currently trading near all-time highs, with the FTSE 250 firm reporting earlier this month that with the seasonally important December trading period now behind it, that it is ‘significantly ahead of where we expected to be at this stage.’
Softcat said trading has continued to be ‘positive’ since its first quarter update on 16 November, with demand from its public sector customers remaining ‘strong’.
OTHER DEALS
Colin Bird, the non-executive chairman of AIM-listed metal recovery business Jubilee Metals (JLP:AIM), has sold 26.3 million shares in the business at a price of 13p each in a deal worth around £3.4 million.
It comes as the miner’s share price has soared in the past six months, rising from around 4.8p to a high of 13p, after its first half earnings rocketed 123% to £28.4 million as its platinum and chrome tailing recovery operations ran at record levels.
