Norwegian investor Arne Fredly has built his holding in Kjell Inge Rokke’s offshore shipping holding company Akastor after selling out of Hunter Group.
Fredly’s Apollo Asset bought 2.5m shares on Tuesday, when the share closed at NOK 13.06, giving it a 5% stake, an Oslo bourse filing showed.
This would have meant an outlay of around NOK 32.65m ($2.98m).
The stock has since risen to NOK 13.28 on Wednesday.
Billionaire Rokke is the biggest Akastor shareholder on 36.7%. Goldman Sachs has 14% and the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry & Fisheries has 12%.
Apollo’s stake ranks it behind fourth-placed Morgan Stanley’s 9%.
Fredly’s company previously had 11.2m shares and a holding of 4.09%.
Akastor was established as an investment company in 2014 following a demerger of Aker Solutions.
The company holds a broad portfolio of industrial and financial holdings, and controls three subsea support vessels.
Hunter exit
Last July, the owner clinched a $282m subsea ship charter extension in Brazil. The 10,900-dwt Aker Wayfarer (built 2010) will stay with Petrobras for a further 1,415 days, or almost four years.
The other two vessels are the 156-loa AKOFS Seafarer (built 2010) and 121-loa AKOFS Santos (built 2009), controlled through its 50%-owned subsidiary AKOFS Offshore, a joint venture with Mitsui OSK Lines and Mitsui & Co of Japan.
Last month, Fredly sold his remaining 100m shares in former VLCC owner Hunter Group to its management for NOK 0.0675 each.
That was a bargain, compared with prices of up to NOK 0.15 available on the open market at the time.
But Fredly told Oslo business daily Finansavisen that the price was right, and the inflated market price was none of his doing.
In January, Hunter paid out most of the remaining proceeds from the sale of its VLCC fleet in a huge extraordinary dividend.
It is now focusing on developing liquid CO2 carriers.
