[UPDATED 08.11.09 @ Noon EDT -- Right here.]
Schering-Plough's largest institutional shareholder, Wellington Capital Management, just disclosed to the SEC, a few minutes ago, that it has gone from holding almost 13 percent of all the outstanding shares of Schering-Plough, to holding just under 6.6 percent of them. That is a massive move -- over 100 million shares! Here is the history, on Wellington, looking back a few years:
July 31, 2009: 107,654,735 shares, or 6.59%. . . .
February 17, 2009: 210,245,110 shares or 12.93%. . . .
February 14, 2008: 190,544,131 shares or 11.76%. . . .
February 14, 2006: 156,897,180 shares or 10.62%. . . .
It had hung tough through all the Vytorin/Zetia ENHANCE and SEAS woes, but I can certainly see why it might take half off the table, here. It likely owns a big chunk of Merck, and would rather be in complete control of the timing of managing that single issuer concentration risk, down, if/when the reverse-merger occurs.
Fascinating.
4 comments:
What's also fascinating is that they increased their holdings by 19,700,979 (10.34%) on Feb 17th, 2009 right before SP publicly announced that they had submitted the complete response to the FDA for asenapine (Feb 20th); and about 3 weeks before the deal with Merck was announced.
They also increased their holdings by 33,646,951(21.44%) on Feb 17, 2009. A few weeks after FDA would have had its midcycle review meeting on asenapine where under MOUs that can be found in the FDA reading room FDA has to tell SP if they've found any major issues that might hold up approval.
Salmon
Very interesting, Salmon, indeed.
It would greatly surprise me to learn that anyone inside Schering-Plough, or FDA, was tipping anyone at Wellington.
I just don't see what the company people would have to gain. Any payment would be easily traceable under the money-laundering statutes, and no one in his or her right mind would do this for less than $10,000 -- which amount would trigger all the reporting alarms.
Possible? Yes. Probable? I'm am a skeptic about that. A fascinating possibility, though, just the same.
Namaste
Condor,
I've seen and heard too many things in my life to dismiss 'coincidences'.
Salmon
I took a look at the prices and other events around the last 3 purchases and prima fascia it's hard to tell. It still seems strange to me to sell immediately prior to an approval. Even if an approval is expected, I had thought that prices will rise with an approval and if so why not just wait another week or 2 at most. Plus the Feb 17, 2009 date seems a little convenient, although you could say the CR letter had been received and the sale of SP was I believe a rumor.
Even so I did some quick calcs and just on the last 2 purchases Wellington seems to have walked off with a $313 Million return on $1.1 Billion invested, for a 28.4% return over a period of 17 months.
Not bad.
It would be interesting to know how much they made on the other 49.2 million shares they sold.
Salmon
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