Navios Maritime Containers may soon offer to buy back shares from stakeholders.

The Navios Maritime Holdings spin-off's board of directors has authorised a repurchase programme for up to $6m of its common shares over a one-year period.

Angeliki Frangou-led Navios Containers will make the repurchases from time to time for cash in open-market transactions at current market prices or via private negotiations.

The New York-listed company's management will determine timing and amount of repurchases based on market conditions and other factors, it said.

The containership owner has a market capitalisation of $32m with 34.6m shares outstanding.

Its shares, which trade on the Nasdaq stock market under the ticker symbol NMCI, gained 13.5% to close at $0.91 on Friday. They fell 5.5% to $0.86 within the first 90 minutes of after-hours trading.

Lawsuit

The share buyback comes as Navios Containers faces legal action from two shareholders that alleged it lied to prompt investment before using a conversion plan to undercut their rights and enrich chief executive Frangou, as TradeWinds has reported.

On Monday, Mangrove Partners and 683 Capital Partners — which together own 16.1% of the Nasdaq-listed company — accused the boxship owner of fraud in its 2018 direct listing, a new allegation in a legal dispute that began in March.

The duo said Navios Containers never mentioned a "plan of conversion", which would see the company made into a limited partnership upon going public, until it was about to do so.

That is despite ostensible adoption of the plan the day before Mangrove invested millions of dollars in shares, the companies alleged in the lawsuit.

Neither Navios Containers nor its attorneys at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in New York responded to requests for comment.