Emanuele Lauro is the latest Scorpio Tankers executive to cash in a whopping sum of company shares in a sale that brings him $27.2m in proceeds.
The sale of 419,000 shares disclosed on Thursday means chief executive Lauro and his right-hand man, president Robert Bugbee, have together sold more than 900,000 shares this month for proceeds of some $59m as they take advantage of a two-year run-up in the stock.
Bugbee filed papers on Wednesday with US securities regulators showing the sale of 500,000 shares worth $32.2m — less than half of his last reported holding in the stock.
Lauro at last report in March owned 713,593 shares of Scorpio stock.
Helped greatly by a recovery in the market for clean products, Scorpio has orchestrated a remarkable transformation of its balance sheet from a low point at the start of 2022, when it was all but left for dead by some equity analysts.
The operator of 111 tankers had put virtually all of its fleet on expensive lease financing to boost liquidity, but has since been unwinding those leases, paying down debt and buying back stock.
At its quarterly earnings announcement in November, Scorpio said it had reduced debt by $1.3bn since the start of 2022, and in the year bought back 10m shares for $490m.
At the same time, it signalled it would soon be ready — perhaps this quarter — to prioritise returning capital to shareholders, either through fattened dividend payments or further share repurchases.
Scorpio shares were up a further 2% in trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The current price of around $65.65 is pushing towards the record high of $66.93 reached on 4 January.
Lauro and Bugbee have led the Monaco- and New York-based company since its 2010 IPO.
