Directors’ dealings by Andrew Hore

Miltos Kambourides, a director of Dolphin Capital Investors and managing partner of its investment adviser Dolphin Capital Partners, bought shares through two companies in which he owns significant stakes and has spent £45 million since the start of December. Shares were acquired in the market for prices ranging from 123.5p to 139p, with the highest price representing a 25 per cent discount to Dolphin’s net asset value of 185p at the end of November.

Kambourides increased his total indirect holding from 3.2 million shares to 36.9 million – equivalent to 7.1 per cent of the company – while his pro rata stake, based on shareholdings in the purchasing companies, is now just above 15 million shares.

Dolphin joined AIM in December 2005, raising £70.7 million at 68p. It invests in residential resort developments in the eastern Mediterranean region and recently announced its first investment outside its core region, in the Dominican Republic.

Founding pair pile in
Founders Morgan Jones and Ian Watson have each acquired 100,000 shares at 103p in Hansteen, taking their stakes in the continental European industrial properties investor to 1.5 per cent a piece. The duo pursued a similar strategy in the UK with Ashtenne, taken over in May 2005 in a deal worth £170 million, and believe that other Western European countries provide much better value than the UK. Hansteen, which floated in December 2005 at 100p a share, reported an NAV of 123p at the end of June.

Elsewhere within the sector, directors of O Twelve Estates have been buying shares, albeit in smaller amounts. The band of four, including chairman Phillip Rhodes, appear to have got a bargain, paying 37p a share when the market price was 46.25p and NAV at the end of September was 89p – together they invested just over £57,000.

O Twelve raised £122.5 million at £1 a share in March 2006 and there is a clue to its strategy in its name, with the company having been set up to invest in property in East London and surrounding environs in order to benefit from uplifts in value related to the 2012 Olympics.

Out of Steppe
John Richardson, canny non-executive chairman of Kazakhstan cement company Steppe Cement, sold his remaining holding in the company just before Christmas. Richardson, former boss of Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, disposed of 60,000 shares at 247p, having sold 440,000 shares at 252p a month earlier, both sales raising £1.25 million.

A director of Steppe when it joined AIM in September 2005, Richardson did not have any shares at the time but he acquired 500,000 shares in January 2006 as part of a placing at US$1.50. This means that he has more than trebled his initial investment of US$750,000.

Trading at Steppe is strong, with the latest interims showing a 31 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to US$15.6 million, helped by rising cement prices. Even though the share price has fallen by nearly one-third in the past six months, the company still trades on nearly 30 times post-tax earnings for the rolling 12-month period to June 2007.

Finally, Immupharma’s chairman, Richard Warr, and chief executive, Dimitri Dimitriou, each sold 900,000 shares at 73p each just before Christmas, with the buyer, Powe Capital, taking its stake to 5.6 per cent. Warr and Dimitriou still own 16.3 per cent each of Immupharma, which is developing drugs to treat medical conditions such as autoimmune disease and which recently acquired the rights to a drug that could potentially inhibit the growth of some cancerous tumours.