Frangou becomes Navios Holdings’ majority owner after converting debt to shares

Chief executive Angeliki Frangou has positioned herself as the majority owner of Navios Maritime Holdings after she converted more debentures she had held since a January refinancing package.

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Frangou owns the shares through Raymar Investments, Amadeus Maritime and her ship management company Navios Shipmanagement (NSM).

According to the SEC filing, Frangou picked up 5.33m more shares of Navios Holdings through the convertible debenture and put them under NSM.

As a result, she has 1.27m remaining shares under a convertible debenture of $24m with a strike price of $3.90 per share that she can convert into common stock for further ownership in Navios Holdings.

Frangou last increased her stake in Navios Holdings in early July to 46% when she acquired 2.09m more Navios Holdings shares through the convertible debenture and folded them into NSM.

NSM now holds 17.6m shares, or 43.5%, of Navios Holdings. Amadeus Maritime owns 1.27m shares representing 5.6% of Navios Holdings, while Raymar Investments holds 1.37m units, or 6%, of the company.

Frangou previously increased her position in Navios Holdings in January to 10.2m shares, or 34.8%, from 4.2m shares, or 17%, through the convertible debenture. She then upped it to 40.8% by buying another 3m shares, also in early July.

Navios Holdings, which will no longer directly own vessels after selling its bulker fleet and is focused on growing Frangou’s Navios South America Logistics business, closed a $550m refinancing in January, allowing it to pay off $614m in bonds that had been set to mature in January.

As the company previously announced in December, the refinancing was possible because of nearly $263m in payment-in-kind loans from an outfit affiliated with Frangou, the company’s largest shareholder.

Navios Holdings will make $10m quarterly payments to the Frangou affiliate starting in the third quarter of 2023 and pay an upfront fee in the form of $24m in debentures.

In late July, Navios Holdings sold its 36 bulkers to spin-off Navios Maritime Partners for $835m, after the daughter company had previously taken over Navios Maritime Acquisition for $827m in January.

These moves created a Navios Partners fleet of 188 ships and 22 newbuildings and was the latest step in untangling a complex web of Navios Group companies.