Directors’ Dealings by Ben Jaglom

One of the biggest recent sell-offs of shares took place at AIM 50-quoted UK oil explorer EnCore Oil, which saw its board members sell a total of 4.05 million shares, netting a total of £5.79 million. CEO Alan Booth sold 1.55 million shares at 143p, 19 per cent of his holding.

Meanwhile, FD Eugene Whyms sold 1.5 million shares, 20 per cent of his holding, at 142p, the same price that exploration director Graham Doré sold at. Doré sold a total of one million shares, 18 per cent of his holding.

The sell-off came days after the Baker Street-headquartered outfit announced a discovery at its Varadero well in the North Sea, with oil discovered with an API (American Petroleum Institute) gravity of approximately 26 degrees.

Elsewhere on AIM, mobile payments provider Bango saw non-executive chairman Lindsay Bury sell 295,000 shares at 150p each. Bury, who is retiring after ten years at the company, sold his shares to a variety of institutional investors, which was described as being for ‘financial planning’ reasons.

Having netted a total of £442,500 from the sale, Bury currently retains 800,000 shares at 20p each, a total of 2.1 per cent of the issued ordinary shares.

Last November, Bango unveiled a widening of losses to £458,000 (2009: loss of £242,179) on turnover down 13.9 per cent to £10.6 million. The company noted that despite the disappointing figures, a recent deal with RIM, the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, to handle the payments on its App World should boost its prospects.

Big Brother mastermind ups YouGov stake
While there were some significant sell-offs on AIM, market research outfit YouGov reported that media guru and non-executive director Peter Bazalgette upped his stake.

Bazalgette, an ex-president of the Cambridge Union and former BBC journalist, is perhaps
best known for his role at TV production giant Endemol UK, where he became famous for popularising the Big Brother reality TV series in the UK.

Bazalgette purchased a total of 63,031 shares in YouGov at 47p for a total of £29,625. YouGov recently announced that it was disposing of the colourfully monikered Great Place to Work in a management buy-out of the German firm, netting £800,000 from the deal.

Also on AIM, Peter Hadsley-Chaplin, chairman of M.P. Evans, a producer of Indonesian palm oil and Australian beef cattle, picked up 4,000 shares at 490p, spending a total of £19,600.

Following the recent flooding in Queensland, M.P. Evans, which owns land in the Woodlands region of Southern Queensland, which was not damaged, announced that it would probably benefit from the ‘above-average rainfall’.
However, the North Australian Pastoral company, in which it holds a 34.7 per cent stake, did not fare as well, reporting some ‘moderate’ damage to property and the loss of 200 cattle.

Purchases at PLUS
Another AIM-quoted concern
to report director buying was stock market operator PLUS Markets Group.

The company saw various members of the board dip into the market to purchase stock. Chairman Giles Vardey bought 250,000 shares at 2p a share, while CEO Cyril Theret spent 240,000 at the same price. The bout of board buying was completed by finance director Nemone Wynn-Evans, who also bagged 240,000 shares at 2p apiece, with a total of 730,000 shares purchased for £14,600.

PLUS has not had an easy time of late. In its most recent set of results, for the six months to 30 June, it recorded losses of £2.5 million (2009: £5.7 million loss) on revenue of £1.5 million. Last December saw PLUS announce the launch of its new in-house trading platform, PLUS1, built in less than five months as part of its aim to reduce its technology infrastructure costs by 75%.

The company has not yet made a profit, but results for the year-end are expected shortly.