By PAUL PANCKHURST
Fourteen months after the float of Turners Auctions, Guinness Peat Group yesterday exited by selling a 19.9 per cent shareholding for $22.8 million.
The corporate raider is believed to have reaped $35 million to $40 million from what was a 38.8 per cent stake when the car sales company
floated last October.
Turners has been a spectacular performer, tripling in price since the share issue for the initial public offering.
Goldman Sachs JBWere's "accelerated book build offering" put the company in a trading halt for the day and some slices of the stake were flicked on for other brokers to sell.
GPG director Tony Gibbs said it was a deliberate effort to widen the spread of shareholders.
Spun out of fruit and vegetable producer Turners & Growers, Turners Auctions issued $1.50 shares for a sharemarket float in October last year. They now trade at $4.50.
Yesterday's sell-down was at $4.30 - the top of the range set by GPG - and drew heavy demand.
One new institutional investor arrived on the company's register as a result of yesterday's selldown, and another bulked up its stake.
The biggest shareholder in the company is Bartel Holdings, ultimately owned by Ecuador's Alvaro Noboa family, the people behind Bonita bananas. Bartel is sitting at just over 20 per cent.
Gibbs said: "I'm still chairman today - I don't think anyone's asking me to walk the plank or anything like that."
