Barclays Plc, on Thursday May 5, announced details of the sale of the first tranche of its shares in Barclays Africa Group Limited (BAGL).
The shares were sold to a mix of existing and new investors.
A total of 103,592,491 ordinary shares were sold at a price of ZAR 13,053 million, reducing the Barclays PLC stake in BAGL to 50.1%, the bank said in a statement Thursday May 5.
Barclays said completion of this transaction demonstrates a healthy investor appetite for BAGL, with the book covered multiple times.
Barclays said the selling of the shares amounts to about one-fifth of its stake in BAGL for about 13.1 billion rand ($879 million) as part of Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley’s plan to overhaul the British lender. The sale amounts to 12.2 percent of BAGL’s shares.
The shares were bought for 126 rand each, a discount of about 11 percent to the average price over the past 30 days, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Jes Staley, who took over last year, announced on March 1 the bank was retreating from Africa with other measures to raise cash, shrink globally and lighten its capital burden. Barclays Africa is South Africa’s third-largest bank and has operations in 12 nations across the continent, with more than 12 million customers.
