The latest share purchase puts him roughly one per cent away from catching up with RC Investment, the bridge holder currently holding the largest stake (22.94 per cent) in the company.
Femi Otedola, the chair of First HoldCo Plc, procured 706.1 million new shares in the banking group on Wednesday, a market disclosure said, taking his interest in the corporation to 21.95 per cent.
The tycoon purchased the shares through Calvados Global Services Limited, his special purpose vehicle, in various deals worth N77.6 billion.
The latest share purchase puts him roughly one per cent away from catching up with RC Investment, the bridge holder currently holding the largest stake (22.94 per cent) in the company.
RC Investment, last July, emerged as the trustee for the 10.4 billion shares simultaneously offloaded by Oba Otudeko and Oye Hassan-Odukale, two of First HoldCo’s top shareholders at the time, in the course of a single-day trade.
Until then, those two had held their stakes through Barbican Capital Limited and Leadway Group & Affiliates, respectively.
Mr Otedola has been accumulating First HoldCo shares since 2021, the year he became the largest shareholder of the financial services group, with the last acquisition as recently as June, when he added 672.9 million shares valued at N29.6 billion to his holdings.
He completed the share purchase during the N45 billion second tranche of the lender’s N350 billion private placement programme, where each unit sold went for N44.
First HoldCo, which became Nigeria’s most valuable bank stock on Monday, is looking to inject the cash raised from the programme into First Bank of Nigeria Limited, its commercial banking division, as part of its capital restoration plan and broader balance sheet strengthening programme.
It lost the one-day honour to Zenith Bank on Tuesday, when it was valued at N4.77 trillion, behind its rival’s N4.84 trillion.
First HoldCo is nursing ambitions to beef up its paid-up capital to N1 trillion, having secured shareholders’ approval at its last annual general meeting in May.
