Scorpio Tankers president Robert Bugbee has decided to cash out part of his stake in the company’s financial resurgence to the tune of $32.2m.
Bugbee’s sale of 500,000 shares was disclosed on Tuesday in a filing with US securities regulators. He declined to comment on the filing when contacted by TradeWinds on Wednesday.
Bugbee has led the Monaco- and New York-based company in tandem with chief executive Emanuele Lauro since its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010.
He has been known as a serial buyer of the company’s stock. But with Scorpio now up nearly six-fold from a low of $11.50 per share in December 2021, Bugbee has decided to take some winnings off the table.
The amount sold in two transactions this month still equates to less than half of his overall holding, according to the company’s annual report filed on 24 March 2023. He held just over 1m shares, or a 1.7% stake at that time.
Scorpio shares were on the move again in midday trading on Wednesday in New York, up nearly 4% on the day to $65.34 and nearing the 52-week high of $66.93.
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 within this quarter — to prioritise returning capital to shareholders, either through fattened dividend payments or further share repurchases.
Scorpio shares have kept climbing, and now Bugbee has personally reaped some of the rewards.
With Scorpio harvesting about $200m in cash per quarter and its market capitalisation busting through $3bn, Bugbee told TradeWinds’ Streetwise newsletter in November that “it’s literally like a dream”.
He added: “We’re where we’ve always dreamt and hoped we would be. Modern fleet in the water. High-quality operation in a very strong market. Low leverage, high liquidity, high market cap. Market leader. It’s beyond hope.”
Bugbee made an earlier fortune in the 2000s as president of the former OMI Corp alongside CEO Craig H Stevenson Jr. The two presided over years of transformation that took the Stamford owner from a penny stock to an outfit that sold for $2.2bn to Teekay Corp and Torm in 2007.
