Shipless shipowner Hunter Group is sailing on without former principal Arne Fredly, after the departure yesterday of the Monaco-based Norwegian investor and the sale of his remaining shares to his three top managers.
Chief executive Erik Frydendal, chief financial officer Lars Brynildsrud and chief operating officer Sujoy Seal now hold the largest bloc of shares in the Oslo-listed former VLCC owner, with just over 19% together, counting unexercised options, according to a regulatory filing.
“We definitely do have some plans,” Frydendal told TradeWinds, adding that he expects to have an announcement by the end of March.
“We are eager to report something, but the timing is not entirely up to us,” he said.
“And we will have to make our next deal known through the officially required channels and not, unfortunately, through your fine publication.”
But a source close to the company told TradeWinds that Hunter Group can be expected to stay in or near the shipping space with its planned new projects — because of the management team’s specialised expertise and contacts, and because of deals that have already been proposed.
The source said Hunter is close to wrapping up any one of three possible projects, all of which are “related to water” and two of which are specifically shipping investments.
On Monday, Frydendal, Brynildsrud and Seal each purchased one-third of Fredly’s remaining 100m Hunter Group shares for NOK 0.0675 per share.
That was a bargain, compared with prices of up to NOK 0.15 available on the open market.
But Fredly told Oslo business daily Finansavisen that the price was right, and the inflated market price is none of his doing.
In January, Hunter Group paid out most of the remaining proceeds from the sale of its VLCC fleet in a huge extraordinary dividend.
But even as a financial shipowning company without assets, Oslo public investors found Hunter worth buying, in the expectation that Fredly would use the stock-listed platform to mount new projects.
Meanwhile, Fredly was selling down.
“I sold quite a few shares at NOK 0.07 last week and I felt that was a good indicator of what the correct value was. If, after that, somebody pumps up the share and writes fairy tales about it on the internet, I can’t be held responsible for it,” he told Finansavisen.
The paper points out that Fredly did sell a large parcel of shares at a higher level late last week.
The sale of his last 100m shares to management yesterday was based on what he and they knew the shares were worth.
“I could have sold [the remaining shares] on the market today, but I wanted to be a nice guy, and I let the management buy them at cash value,” he told the paper.
