A fund controlled by Lion Capital and Longshield Investment sold shares in the Infinity Capital offer

FIA Active Plus, an investment fund managed by Swiss Capital Asset Management and whose units are almost entirely owned by Lion Capital and Longshield Investment Group, sold shares in Infinity Capital Investments in the offer made by the former SIF Oltenia this month, according to reports from the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB).

The fund reported a decrease in its holding in Infinity Capital below the 5% threshold on August 21, respectively to 1.49%, 9.5% below its holding at the end of June, which was almost 11%. This month, Infinity bought back nearly 42 million of its own shares, equivalent to about 9.8% of its share capital, through an offer that was oversubscribed, meaning that FIA Active Plus sold heavily in the offer.

The market operation, which took place between August 6 and 25, was composed of two buyback programs approved at Infinity's shareholders' meeting this spring. One program aimed to buy back 40 million of its own shares, equivalent to 8.4% of its share capital, with the securities to be cancelled to reduce the capital of the alternative investment fund. The other program intended to acquire two million of its own shares for free distribution to the company's administrators, directors and employees in order to retain them, according to performance criteria established by the Infinity Capital Investments Board of Directors.

At the end of the first quarter of this year, Lion Capital held 55.9% of the fund units of FIA Active Plus, while Longshield Investment Group had 42.4%, thus the cumulative holding being 98.3% of the fund, as shown in the reports of the two former SIFs at BVB. Lion Capital controls Longshield Investment Group because it owns the administrator of SAI Muntenia Invest, so that the former SIF Banat-Crişana de facto controls FIA Active Plus because the existence of the fund practically depends on its investments.

FIA Active Plus is one of the interposed funds through which the former SIF Banat-Crişana and SIF Mutenia hostilely took over the management of the former SIF Oltenia. Basically, the two SIFs financed a constellation of funds of other administrators, thus ending up directly and indirectly owning over 30% of SIF Oltenia, when there was still a 5% ownership threshold. But the Financial Supervisory Authority has argued in one that there is no collusion because the fund managers are independent of those who finance them.

Infinity Capital Investments reported a Net Asset Value of 3.84 million lei for July, equivalent to a trading discount of 67% to the stock market capitalization of almost 1.27 billion lei.