Metro Bank launches £350m share placing at discounted price
Metro Bank has launched a discounted share placing as the troubled bank taps up investors to raise £350m of capital.
The challenger bank, which has struggled following a major loans blunder in January, placed the shares at 500p, a discount on today’s closing price of 536.5p.
Read more: Metro Bank shares soar ahead of £350m capital raise announcement
Shares fell 8.13 per cent today as investors reacted to reports of the discount before the bank made its official announcement after the market closed.
The placing will close by tomorrow at 4pm at the latest, and a general meeting has been called for 3 June, Metro said today.
The lender was forced to quash reports of financial turmoil earlier this week which saw customers rush to withdraw funds and items from safety deposit boxes and sent shares fell to an all-time low of 475p.
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In January the bank admitted that commercial loans had been wrongly classified and should have been among its risk weighted assets, sparking the worst one-day share price drop for a British bank since the financial crisis.
In its first quarter results the bank revealed that it had lost some of its largest commercial customers as deposits fell 3.6 per cent and profits halved to £4.3m.
Metro announced the capital raise plan in February as it published its full-year results.