By Dipo Olowookere
The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) has admitted additional 7.43 billion ordinary shares of Lafarge Africa Plc on its trading platform.
The new shares of the company came from the N89.2 billion rights issue exercise carried out by the cement maker recently, which recorded 100 percent subscription, according to a recent statement.
The new 7.43 billion ordinary shares of 50 kobo each were sold to existing shareholders of Lafarge Africa at N12 per unit from Monday, December 17, 2018 to Monday, January 28, 2018.
Business Post reports that the company issued 6 new shares for every 7 shares held by shareholders as at December 4, 2018, which was the qualification date.
During the exercise, Chapel Hill Denham acted as the lead issuing house, while Stanbic IBTC Capital was the joint issuing house.
With this listing of the additional 7.43 billion ordinary shares on NSE, the total issued and fully paid up shares of Lafarge Africa are now 16.11 billion ordinary shares.
Earlier this month, Lafarge Africa unveiled details of subscriptions of the rights issue, saying 1,826 Acceptance Forms for 7,434,367,256 units of the rights issue received were found to be valid under the terms of the exercise and were processed accordingly.
In addition, it said 1,734 shareholders accepted their rights issue in full totalling 5,931,501,457 ordinary shares, out of which 738,731,071 ordinary shares were traded on the floor of the NSE.
Also, 92 shareholders with a provisional allotment of 395,875,060 ordinary shares partially accepted their rights for 202,401,994 ordinary shares.
Lafarge Africa said as a result of the above, the balance of 193,473,066 ordinary shares were renounced, with 34 subscribers purchasing rights of 738,731,071 ordinary shares on the floor of the NSE.
It was further said that of the 1,734 shareholders who took up their rights in full, 734 shareholders also applied for additional 1,300,463,805 ordinary shares and were allotted in full from the renounced rights, while a total of 1,106,990,739 ordinary shares were fully renounced, bringing the total number of shares renounced to 1,300,463,805 ordinary shares.
