Access Engineering gifts Rs 3 b shares to employees

Anjana Samarasinghe

Access Engineering Limited (AEL) founder shareholders Sumal Perera, Christopher Joshua and Ranjan Gomez have awarded 15 percent of AEL shareholdings to the company's employees yesterday.

AEL has gifted 120 million shares ( total value of Rs 3 billion ) to its over 1000 employees. This gifting of shares to its employees together with the Rs 4.5 billion private placement are among the initiatives taken by the company to broadbase the ownership of AEL prior to its Stock Market listing.

AEL Chairman Sumal Perera said by awarding shareholdings to their employees they expect to improve performance and motivate employees.

"This was not an overnight decision to broaden our ownership and there was a trend in our company to share ownership", he said.

"Now we have additional responsibility to our investors to add value to the company and improve its governance. The company will soon appoint three new independent directors to improve the company's governance," he said.

AEL Joint Managing Director Christopher Joshua said the company will gift these shares to over 1,000 employees of Access Engineering and 34 employees in Access Group for their contribution to the company.

The majority of shares have been gifted to executive directors and corporate management teams.

This has been done in a very fair and equitable manner taking into consideration the basics of remuneration and profit share basis adopted in the past," he said. Since the company is not listed in the CSE there is no free tradable market for these employees till AEL gets listed in the CSE. Even before CSE listing they can sell their shares with the approval of the company.

The company also expects to get listed.

With the ongoing infrastructure development projects in the country and the boom in the construction industry AEL will be able to excel in the industry and this will add value to the shares of the company after listing, bringing in more returns to the employees.