Irish shareholders in UK insurance giant Aviva are being targeted by a US firm seeking to buy their shares on the cheap.
Correspondence seen by The Irish Times shows Delaware-incorporated Litani LLC writing to Irish investors in Aviva, offering to buy their shares at £5.30 (€6.19) a piece – even though they are currently changing hands on the London Stock Exchange at almost £6.90.
Litani is a so-called arbitrage firm that seeks to profit from buying shares at discount to their market price.
Much of Aviva’s Irish investor base stems from the initial public offering (IPO) of predecessor company Norwich Union in 1997. Some 150,000 of Irish members of the one-time mutual insurer received shares before its demutualisation and flotation that year, according to reports from the time.
Norwich Union merged in 2000 with rival CGU, which had just completed the cash-based purchase of Hiberian Insurance in Ireland, to become Aviva.
