Directors of digital transformation company Kainos (KNOS) and paper supplier DS Smith (SMDS) were among the big boardroom sellers this week.
Kainos, worth £2.38 billion, revealed that the partner of director Richard McCann, Kerry McCann, had offloaded 50,000 ordinary shares in the FTSE 250-listed digital technology firm. McCann sold the shares on 23 August at an average price of £18.83, worth a total value of £941,500.
Back in June, Kainos bought Cloudator’s Workday division for an undisclosed sum as part of an effort to further increase its Workday practice in Europe, adding 55 specialist Workday employees across the continent. Kainos stock was trading up 5p at £19.31 early on Thursday.
CASHING IN ON PAPER
That stock sale was trumped this week by Adrian Marsh, finance director at paper maker DS Smith. The chief number cruncher flogged more than 350,000 DS Smith shares at an average price of just over 441p per share, netting Marsh a cool £1.55 million.
The sales were struck on 23 August over three separate trades, selling 67,592 shares at 444.50p per share, 15,922 at 442.01p, and largest of the lot, flogging 270,946 at 437.30p.
Shares in Marsh’s firm DS Smith had fallen nearly 2% in early trading on Thursday, to 433.3p. The stock has rallied more than 6% over the past month or so.
Doing the opposite by buying more stock in his company was Robert Quarta, the chairman of medical devices developer Smith & Nephew (SN.). The £12.3 billion company revealed on Tuesday that Quarta had acquired 4,149 ordinary shares in the FTSE 100-listed maker of joint replacements, among other things.
Quarta, who joined the board of Smith & Nephew in 2013, purchased the shares at an average price of £14.205 each, for a total value of £58,936.54. Smith & Nephew shares were down 0.3% at £14.095 on Thursday morning.
EVE NUMBER CRUNCHER GOES TO THE MATRESSES
Beleaguered AIM-quoted mattress seller Eve Sleep (EVE:AIM) said this week that its chief financial officer Tim Parfitt had ploughed £12,300 of his own cash into shares in the company. The finance boss snapped up 400,000 shares at an average price of 3.075p per share.
Parfitt now owns 1.02 million shares in the company, representing 0.37% of Eve Sleep’s issued share capital. Eve Sleep stock was trading flat on Thursday at 3.5p, valuing the business at £9.6 million.
Eve Sleep listed on the AIM market amid much fanfare in 2017, raising £35 million for a then £140 million market value.
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