Founders shell out big bucks

An interesting couple of announcements from Discovery over the last couple of days, one relates to the directors and related parties with regards to following their rights. First, the quantum of Adrian Gore's share, looking to maintain his shareholding in the company. We were discussing this a little in the office yesterday. The group CEO exercised 4,318,732 rights at 90 Rand, the total amount is a crazy 388,685,880 Rand. Read that again, 388 million Rand to maintain his holding in the company and to not be diluted. Obviously he does not have the money lying around, right?


The less talked about Barry Swartzberg (the co-founder) had to shell out 198.9 million Rand to follow his 2,210,735 rights. Collectively Barry and Adrian are following their rights to the tune of 587.65 million Rands, over half a billion Rand. Both of them are huge shareholders in their personal capacities, according to the last annual report, I have done my best to circle and show the extent of their huge holdings. Via the Discovery annual report.





So after this rights issue, Barry Swartzberg has (presuming he has not sold in-between now and then, June 2014) 25,763,238 shares, worth 3.413 billion Rand at the closing price of 132.49 Rand a share. And Adrian Gore? Presuming the same, that he has the same amount of shares from back then, Gore has 50,329,224 shares worth 6.668 billion Rand at the closing price. Collectively between themselves, they are not a Dollar billionaire yet. That must be the next stop!