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Each month we trawl through hundreds of RNS statements from AIM companies. In this column we will highlight an exceptional item from an AIM company, particularly where we feel the market may not have priced in recent news.

I must confess to a last minute change of plan for this month’s ‘AIM Snippet’. We had planned to cover Avocet Mining following the announcement of first gold production at its Inata mine in Burkina Faso on 20 December 2009. We were particularly impressed that Avocet expects to increase production here to over 10,000 ounces per month by July 2010.

Whilst we remain optimistic for Avocet’s prospects, we decided at the last minute to switch our attention away from this Gold Miner to Technology Group, Sagentia. Some readers may remember that we featured Sagentia in Aimzine in April 2009 – click here to read this article.

The news that caught our eye was Sagentia’s RNS on 30 December 2009 which announced that three directors had purchased shares. The shares were purchased from the Sagentia Group Employee Trust at a price of 15.5 pence per share (the mid price at the time of purchase).

The details of the shares purchased are as follows:

Sagentia has not had the best of years in 2009. Firstly there was the tragic death of Chief Executive, Alistair Brown in April. Also, the Group’s results for the first half of 2009 were quite disappointing. However, as we noted in our April article, Sagentia’s assets are worth several times its market capitalisation and hence director purchases are interesting, to say the least.

One thing that may deter investors here is that Swedish Finance Group, Catella, owns 49% of Sagentia’s issued share capital and has done so since 1996. It is particularly interesting, therefore, that the largest director share purchase was by Non-executive Director, Staffan Ahlberg. Staffan is described on Sagentia’s website as ‘a serving director of ‘Catella AB’. We were not able to find confirmation of this directorship on Catella’s own website, but undoubtedly this director has a Catella connection.

There has been no trading news from Sagentia since the interim results issued in August 2009. Sagentia’s end year is 31 December and their final results will probably be announced in February or March. We look forward to reporting on these results and on progress with the business. With director purchases in the last week of the financial year it is unlikely that the results will be too bad!

assets worth several times

its market capitalisation

Written by Michael Crockett

Copyright Aimzine Ltd

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