Family trusts reveal plans to sell £365m of shares in Wood group

TRUSTS controlled by the Wood family are selling more than £365 million of shares in Aberdeen-based Wood Group under a £1.05 billion return of cash to shareholders.

The 58.5 million shares being sold by the trusts, which have been established for the benefit of family members and charities, is almost three times the minimum they indicated they would sell under the tender offer announced last month.

The trusts said the move was "in line with their stated intention to diversify their highly concentrated position of Wood Group shares within their investment portfolios".

The move will see the trusts' combined holding in the oil services company fall from 11.7 per cent to 1.1 per cent although chairman Sir Ian Wood, along with other board directors, did not tender any of his personal stake in the business.

In total, the percentage of the company connected with the Wood family is expected to halve to around 11 per cent following the tender.

The company is returning cash to shareholders following the sale of its well support division for 1.75bn to General Electric, a much higher figure than it was expected to realise.

At the time of the agreement of the sale, Wood Group said it would allow the company to focus on its core areas of engineering and production support along with gas turbine services.

Some of the proceeds have already been used to pay for its purchase of North-east-based oil production services company PSN which it agreed to buy for 600m in December.

In total, 65.91 million shares were tendered by investors and will be purchased at 625p each for a total cost of 411.9m.

The remainder will be distributed through an issue of B shares with analysts placing a theoretical value of 134p on those. Wood Group yesterday also announced it had won a multi-million dollar, 42-month contract by Chevron in the US for work on commissioning of a production facility in the Gulf of Mexico.

Shares in Wood Group closed unchanged at 625.5p.