On July 03, 2015, People’s Bank (PB) and its subsidiary People’s Leasing & Finance PLC (PLC) jointly acquired 9.57% stake in People’s Merchant Finance PLC (PMB) at 22/- thereby increasing their stake to 48.77%. The parties jointly offered to purchase the remaining shareholding at 22/- on July 17th and concluded the offer on 28th August 2015 according to a release on 31st August.
The offer has been accepted for 38.44% of the shares which will increase the combined shareholding of the offerors to 87.21%.
PMB has not released its interim reports for the last two quarters and the last available financial statements to be made public are as at 31 Dec 2014. As per that the sole foreign investor and Capital Trust related parties seem to have accepted the offer while retail individual investors seem to hold on to the share.
As at 31 Dec 2014, PMB had a NAV per share of 13.95/- and an EPS of (1.55) (loss) for the 9 months (annualized)
As at this date, PMB had a loan book of Rs. 2.5b and a deposit base of Rs. 3.3b while holding a large cash balance on call. Recently the land owned by the company in Navam Mawatha
PLC had assumed duties as management agent of PMB on July 14 consequent to the direction of the Monetary Board.
Mr. G. Ramanan was removed from the post of CEO on June 04, 2015 on the directive of the Monetary Board in terms of the Finance Business Act.
PMB closed trading on Sep 01, 2015 at 28.20/- [+0.60]
