Paul Youane wrote:
True; Coleman's holding company (Crowther Street Holdings Ltd) is the biggest single share holder (45,000 out of 275,835) although the McManus family together hold about 79,000.
The two directors who have quit both have substantial shareholdings (Bell - 35,667 and Lyons 17,850). I would guess at one of two reasons for their quitting; either 1) they were co-opted onto the board to provide developemnt expertise during the delivery of the stadium project; or 2) they are going to cash in on their shares as they now have a value with the stadium asset and will look to sell them to McManus or Coleman (similar thing happened at Warrington at completion of their stadium project).
If you consider that between them they have enough shares to make somebody the biggest shareholder, although some way short of a majority shareholding, it'll be interesting if somebody fancied a punt at owning a stadium. Saints' company structure with many, many small shareholders is a throw back to the days of clubs being run by the local butcher, baker and candlestick-maker. Whether this is good or not for the club going forward I'm not sure. You can understand why McManus and Coleman converted debt into shares though as now between them they have more than a 50% holding and effectively protection from a "hostile" profit seeking take over of the club.
Bell was issued with some extra 15,000 shares as recently as Dec 1st 2011 taking his shares upto 50,667 taking his share up to 15.2% of the total. Similarly Lyons took 10,000 more shares on the same date (now 8.3% of the total). The share capital is now 332,502 not the figure you state (sorry for being a pedant).
The extra shares were issues by way of conversion of their share of the £850,000 of total directors loans which were converted to shares; which makes their resignations all the more strange given that it all happened within two months of the close season.
Clearly something happened in those two months - the problem is that what happened is anything but clearly!
Obviously since resigning they may have sold the shares but in a closed company like this, it is not straight forward.
Sir Mac's (& family)stake is now down slightly to 23.7%. Coleman has 83,333 (25.0%) shares, so they control under 50% between them. However, Coleman has a large convertable loanstock which if fully converted would give him approx 39% of the total, which IMO is fair enough given the amount he has invested.
