City Channel and NTL owner nets €3.7m profit in sale of parent company shares
Millionaire businessman Shane O'Neill -- chairman of UPC Ireland, which owns cable/digital TV operators NTL and Chorus -- has netted a total profit of just under €3.7m by selling off shares in UPC parent Liberty Global.
This brings the profit Mr O'Neill has made on Liberty shares to over €8.1m in the past four months.
Just last April, Mr O'Neill sold €4.4m worth of shares in the same company.
According to a recent filing on the US Nasdaq exchange, Mr O'Neill spent €2.16m exercising options over 184,166 shares at €11.74 in July. He sold the majority of them later that day for €3.94m and sold the others a few days later.
Last month, he sold off more shares in much smaller transactions. The filing also shows that Mr O'Neill still holds 25,768 shares in Liberty Global worth over €732,000.
However, it is understood that he still holds a number of share options that have yet to be exercised.
Mr O'Neill, who is also a chief strategy officer at Liberty Global, a telecoms giant with assets around the globe, joined the firm as managing director of corporate development and mergers and acquisitions.
Prior to that, he was executive director in the advisory group for investment bank Global Sachs in London. Before the investment bank, he spent four years at Macquarie Bank in Sydney and three years at KPMG in Dublin, where he qualified as a chartered accountant. He has a law degree from Trinity College. Goldman Sachs advised NTL on the sale of its assets for €325m to UPC back in 2005.
Earlier this week, a division of Liberty Global, called Liberty Ventures, invested about €2.5m in David Harvey's City Channel for a 35pc stake valuing the regional television station at just under €7m. It is understood that the investment will be used to expand City's presence in Ireland.
Liberty also owns substantial cable and television assets in central Europe, however, and it is expected that the City Channel model will be replicated in central and Eastern European cities where the telecoms firm operates.
