Fidessa chairman John Hamer has invested £327,000 in the financial software provider having sold shares last June for more than £3 a share less than his latest buying price.
Hamer bought 20,000 shares at £16.35 each. This takes his stake to 35,594 shares. He has bought these shares early enough to receive the special dividend of 45p a share, as well as the final of 22p a share, declared in February. The shares go ex-dividend on 11 May. That means that Hamer will receive £13,400 in dividends than he would have done prior to the purchase. Last June, Hamer raised £3.38m by selling 260,000 shares at £13 each. This disposal was timed to beat any changes in capital gains tax and at the time Hamer said that he would reinvest some of the cash in Fidessa shares at a future date.
Even so, the latest share purchase accounts for less than 10% of the cash raised last year. Capital gains tax will have claimed part of the proceeds but the reinvestment is still a relatively small proportion of the cash that wuld be left.
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Hamer was chief executive of Fidessa between 1992 and July 2001 and then became chairman when the company focussed on its financial software business. Hamer joined the company in 1983.
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