Boom time at Baltimore

Fran Rooney will do very nicely out of Baltimore Technlology's planned share offering which will raise £95 million sterling (€146 million) in fresh cash through a flotation on Nasdaq.

The Baltimore boss is selling 150,000 shares into the share offering and the way the Baltimore price is going, Fran Rooney's windfall is getting bigger and bigger.

The Baltimore share issue will not be priced until the end of the month after a bookbuilding exercise to US British and Irish investors. But in little more than a week since the share issue was announced, the shares have risen from £11.50 sterling to more than £14 earlier this week.

The final price of the Baltimore shares being sold by Fran Rooney, chairman Henry Beker and finance director Matthew Bowcock - as well as the new shares issued to raise the £95 million - will not be less than 10 per cent of the price at the end of the bookbuilding exercise.

But if that price ends up anything near the current £14 and a 10 per cent discount is applied, then the shares will be sold at over £12.50 each valuing the 150,000 being sold by Fran Rooney at nearly £2 million.

For Baltimore itself, the higher the price of the shares the fewer the number that have to be issued to raise the £95 million sterling - and the lower the dilution of existing shareholders. The company has said that a maximum of 7.98 million shares will be issued but with the price rising so quickly, it would seem that a lot fewer than that will be issued for Baltimore to get its £95 million.

What went unnoticed in all the coverage was the very enticing US-style share option package that is being put into place for Baltimore directors and executives, a package that Baltimore says it needs to recruit and retain key staff.

If the move to a Nasdaq listing and the expansion of its e-commerce operations in the US achieves anything like the 1999 rise in the share price, then Fran Rooney and his management will move from being simply wealthy to the ranks of the super-rich.