Once upon a time, Metro Bank was going to shake up the old guard in the banking world via the radical strategy of opening branches while others were closing them. The talk was of simplicity, ease of doing business and free dog biscuits. An awful lot of retail shareholders bought into the hype, unfortunately, when Metro floated on the stock market at £20 a share in 2016.
Those investors have now received a harsh lesson. The last time Metro was rescued in 2019, the process involved raising £375m via issuing new equity at 500p a pop which was bad enough. The latest financing package, though, will see a near-quadrupling of the share count by printing new shares at 30p. Small investors are being diluted to near-irrelevance as a Colombian billionaire, Jaime Gilinski Bacal, emerges with 53% ownership.
