A2 execs bank $22m in share sale

A2 Milk Company executives have recently pocketed $22 million between them after selling shares in the dairy marketing company.

Last month the value of the company plunged by $450m after recently appointed chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka sold off $4.36m worth of shares.

But three other executives sold substantial holdings at the same time, in what Hamilton Hindin Greene investment adviser Jeremy Sullivan said was a common practice if people held too much investment in one company.

Chief marketing officer Susan Massasso sold $11m worth of shares, former chief executive for Europe John Wotherspoon $4.8m and chief financial officer Craig Louttit $1.73m.

The shares were all sold between August 30 and September 14. On August 29, A2 shares were valued at $12.93 but by September 14 they had dropped to $11.99.

The share sell-off follows another in March when Massasso cashed in 200,000 shares for $2.8m, and Wotherspoon sold 400,000 for $5.1m.

That month the shares peaked at an all-time high of $14.10 and A2 was New Zealand’s most valuable company by market capitalisation, but by Friday it had fallen to $10.34.

‘‘You don’t want to see executives selling the stock, the more skin in the game they’ve got the better. But people have to consider their own personal balance sheets in regards to concentration of risk, where they have the majority of their wealth tied up within one company,’’ Sullivan said.

‘‘It’s an inherently volatile stock, if you’ve got $20m-$30m in it and it was going up or down 10 per cent a day you might want to sell a few.’’