Avance Gas' controlling shareholder John Fredriksen has snapped up more stock in the VLGC owner to bring his stake to 25%.
The shipowner's private Hemen Holding company bought 395,000 shares at NOK 22.03 each on Tuesday, Avance Gas said in a filing.
This is an outlay of NOK 9.24m ($970,000).
Hemen now owns 15.7m shares, equalling 24.3% of the company.
But tanker owner Frontline, in which Hemen has a 40% stake, also has more than 442,000 shares, giving the tycoon control of 16.1m Avance Gas shares, or 25%. Hemen had 23.7% previously.
The stock closed at NOK 23.40 in Oslo on Tuesday, up 5.6%.
Swedish bank buying
Meanwhile, Swedish lender SEB notified Avance Gas that it had increased its holding from 4.94% to 5.3%.
The bank is the second-biggest investor in the company.
Fredriksen has been adding to his stake this year as Avance Gas' earliest investors exited. He was known to have already bought more than 1m shares in 2020.
In June, Sungas Holdings sold its entire 4.65% stake.
Sungas, controlled by Saudi investor Nasser Al-Rashid, had been the second-largest shareholder up to that point.
The company took 50% ownership of then-private Avance in 2010, after selling it a trio of 2008-built VLGCs.
Avance went public in 2014, with Sungas and the company's other two largest shareholders — Stolt-Nielsen and Frontline — selling tranches of shares worth $175m, alongside $100m in new shares.
Stolt-Nielsen sold out in January in a deal that netted the Norwegian chemical tanker company a profit of $10.8m.
The shipowner held 8.3% of Avance's stock before selling.
