Norman Broadbent (LON:NBB) Chief Executive Officer Mike Brennan caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the shareholders who increased their stake in the company.
Q1: We’ve just seen news that a number of investors have increased their stake in Norman Broadbent, what can you tell us about the investors?
A1: It’d help to give you some background as to why this has come about. One of our shareholders, a small institutional shareholder, a company called City Financial, I’m sure some of your listeners will know that they got themselves into some trouble and cut a long story short, they were effectively forced to sell the stake in our business. That put our stock under some pressure, thankfully we’ve got a number of supportive, very large shareholders who came into the market and basically picked up what was the City Financial stake.
People like Downing, who are our largest shareholder, they have increased their stake so they now hold 27% of the business, Judith MacKenzie, she’s a very well known investor in the market, she runs the portfolio that’s invested in us.
Jon Moulton, he’s a very well known city investor, again I’m sure some of your listeners and readers will be aware of Jon, he’s been supportive of our company for a long time, he came in and picked up an additional stake so he’s now holding just over 17%.
There’s a very well-known entrepreneur called Pierce Casey who’s got a huge amount of experience in our sector, and in fact was our Chairman at one point. He picked some more shares up and he’s taken his shareholding to just over 12%.
There were others who came in as well so we’ve got a number of smaller high-net worth investors who stepped in but I guess the most significant news was that every single member of our Board, the PLC Board, also stepped in and also bought shares. I increased my stake and our CFO he stepped in as well and picked some stock up, as did our Non-Executive team as well.
So, it was a really good all-round team effort, I think, from some very very important shareholders which I think just once again, evidence of how supportive they are of the Norman Broadbent strategy.
