It was a busy week for Cathal Friel, currently Ireland’s Mr IPO, and he shows no sign of slowing down.
Last week, he made headlines when he sold £6.14 million (€7.3 million) of shares – the remainder of his 3.1 per cent stake – in Hvivo, where he is the chairman.
Hvivo had been set up as Open Orphan, a pharmaceutical company, and Friel made it clear in the aftermath that the company was well capable of standing on its own two feet and that he was taking the profit while it was there to be taken.
His time will now be more closely focused on two other listed companies he recently set up, Poolbeg Pharma and European Green Transition.
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In the days after the news of the sale of his shares in Hvivo, it emerged that Poolbeg had de-listed from the OTCQB Market, a New York-based trading platform that allows interested parties to buy and sell shares without the supervision of an exchange. According to a market announcement, it cited “low trading volume and the associated administrative requirements” for the decision.
But it continues to trade on London’s junior AIM market and in the announcement it “[reaffirmed] its ambitions to be dual listed on a national securities exchange in the US, such as Nasdaq, subject to meeting their listing requirements at the appropriate time”.
That’s very much in keeping with Friel’s wider ambition to take as many companies public as he can. Having already floated several companies and made himself and his investors a healthy return, he’s got plans for more in the coming years.
He recently described Poolbeg as a possible “Amryt Two” – a reference to biopharma company Amryt, which he floated in 2016 and was sold last year for $1.48 billion (€1.37 billion) – and has also talked about possible spin-offs from European Green Transition, where he has said the company could have two spin-offs in the near future, with one potentially based around a restructuring of EGT’s rare earth assets.
In fact, Friel said, he has an ambition to do half a dozen more IPOs in the next 10 years, or one every two years. Busy times ahead.
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