Share Watch: Fairpoint chairman buys; HSBC sells Bodycote shares
MATTHEW Peacock, chairman of the Lancashire consumer debt adviser Fairpoint, has bought shares in the business through an investment vehicle based in the Cayman Islands.
On November 21 Hanover Investors Management (Cayman) Limited bought 50,000 ordinary shares of 1p each in the company at 37.25p a share. Mr Peacock is a director and shareholder of Hanover Investors.
He now had has around 0.42% of the Chorley-based company’s issued share capital. Hanover Investors has 22.48%.
Fairpoint, formerly known as Debt Free Direct, shed 90 jobs earlier this year and posted a first-half loss of £1.2m in September. But it said its recovery plan was beginning to pay off.
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HSBC has cut its holding in the Macclesfield thermal processing business Bodycote. The bank held a 7.5% stake in September but has since sold shares and now has 5.84%.
In October it cut its holding to 5.96% but decided to buy again and held 6% on October 17. Those trades followed the decision by directors to buy shares on the back of the £417m sale of Bodycote’s testing division to the New York private equity group Clayton Dubilier & Rice.
When it was first announced in August Bodycote said it planned to return 80p a share to shareholders. It has since shocked shareholders by scaling this back to 40p.
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AVIVA and its subsidiaries has bumped up its holding in the Lancashire mobile phone services company 2ergo.
2ergo said it was told Aviva had lifted its holding from 12.5% of the company to 13.16% after it conducted a share buyback.
The business, based in Rawtenstall, bought 750,000 ordianry shares at 145p on November 28 to hold as treasury shares because of the “continued strength of its current and anticipated cash flows and balance sheet”. It plans to buy a further 250,000.
