The co-founder and chief executive of Deliveroo has sold £47 million of shares in the food delivery company to meet his tax liabilities.
According to a stock exchange filing, the sale was to enable Will Shu, 42, to pay the tax due on restricted stock units granted as part of the £7.6 billion initial public offering in March.
The vesting of the restricted stock units gave Shu almost 22.5 million shares valued £62.5 million at the price of 278p a share. He sold 16.9 million shares at the same price, collecting £47 million, enabling him to pay the tax liability on the restricted stock units.
Adam Miller, 42, the Deliveroo chief financial officer, netted £2.4 million by vesting 854,200 restricted stock units. He disposed of shares valued at £1.93 million to settle his tax bill.
Deliveroo, founded in 2013 by Shu and Greg Orlowski, who left the company in February 2016, is well known in Britain for its workers delivering food on bicycles with brightly coloured backpacks adorned with a kangaroo logo. The company works with 100,000 delivery people and 117,000 restaurants in a dozen countries.
Its listing proved contentious and was dubbed the worst initial public offering in London’s history after the shares sank 30 per cent below their 390p issue price on the first day of trading.
They rose back above 390p in August but have been volatile since then.
News of the share sales yesterday, accomplished via an accelerated bookbuilding process and placing to institutions, sent the stock down by 27½p, or 9.5 per cent, to 262½p. The fall in price came despite an assertion from the company that neither Shu nor Miller would retain any net proceeds from the transaction.
Even though both men were subject to lock-ups preventing them from selling shares for 12 months after the initial public offering, the arrangements detailed in the prospectus allowed the sale of shares to satisfy tax liabilities from restricted stock units or other share options.
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Deliveroo chief Will Shu pays tax bill via share sale