Colonial Pays Its First Dividend In 10 Years

5 July 2016 – Expansión

Colonial will distribute a gross dividend of €0.015 per share to its shareholders today.

Colonial is making dividend distributions again, ten years after it suspended such payments to its shareholders. The real estate company is rewarding its shareholders now that it has completed its recent restructuring and after closing 2015 with a profit of €415 million and a record number of lease contracts.

Colonial will thereby become the first real estate company of those that have managed to overcome the crisis to start paying dividends again, after it also became the first to achieve an investment grade rating from a ratings agency in 2015.

As such, with the recovery of payments to its shareholders, the company has definitively completed the process to clean up, restructure and return to growth that it embarked upon a few years ago and which involved the entry of new shareholders into its capital.

Currently, Colonial’s two largest shareholders are the Qatari sovereign fund, with a 13% stake and the Grupo Villar Mir, with a 9.2% stake, which will thereby receive €6.23 million and €4.43 million in dividends, respectively.

The company’s new third largest shareholder, the Mexican group Finaccess, will receive €4.3 million for the 8% stake that it just purchased in the company in exchange for a batch of assets.

The other high profile shareholders of the real estate company include the Andorran bank MoraBanc, which holds 7%, the Colombian group Santo Domingo (6.8%), the British billionaire Joseph Charles Lewis (5%), the Reig group with a 2.5% stake and several investment funds, which hold between 1.9% and 3% each.

Following the capital increase, which saw the entry of two new shareholders (Finaccess and Reig), and the dividend payment, Colonial is now waiting to carry out another item on the agenda approved at the last General Shareholders’ Meeting: a “reverse share split” of ten shares for one.

The company chaired by Juan José Brugera defines all of these operations within the growth strategy that it is currently undertaking, which has involved expanding the business focus, beyond its three traditional markets (Madrid, Barcelona and Paris) to analyse operations in other European capitals.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake