£160m video game bonanza

AN INDIAN billionaire is set to pocket £160m when a British video games company debuts on London’s stock market.

Anil Ambani, whose Reliance Group has sprawling interests in defence, financial services, media and infrastructure, owns 90pc of Codemasters but will sell down his stake to 28.5pc.

The 58-year-old is estimated to be worth about £1.6bn and is the younger brother of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man.

The pair have been locked in a notorious family feud after splitting up their father’s conglomerate in 2005, clashing recently in the telecoms industry.

Anil Ambani first invested in Warwickshire-based Codemasters eight years ago, initially taking a 50pc stake.

Now his firm, Reliance Big Entertainment, is set to make £159.9m from the float. Codemasters’ British bosses – including chief executive Frank Sagnier, 55 – will also make £10.1m.

Codemasters was founded 31 years ago and is behind the Dirt, Grid and official F1 motor racing games. It said yesterday that it would place 7.5m new shares and 85m existing ones at a price of 200p each.

The company will be valued at about £280m, with 66.1pc of its shares due to be floated overall.

Codemasters said it would use cash generated by the float to plough more money into developing video games, which it said were entering a ‘golden era’.

It employs about 500 people in the UK and has a production centre in Malaysia.

Accounts show it made a loss of more than £10m in the year to March 31, 2017. However it said revenue doubled to £63.6m.