Brokerage sells 3.83 million shares mortgaged by Vietnamese tycoon

At the closing price last week of VND6,190 per share on the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange, the HAG share sale would have fetched nearly VND24 billion ($1.05 million).

Duc still owns 326.7 million shares, accounting for 35.23 percent of the firm’s charter capital.

Last April, another firm, Tan Viet Securities Incorporated had sold more than 1.2 million HAG shares mortgaged by Duc’s brother, Doan Nguyen Thu, who now holds only five million shares or 0.54 per cent of the firm’s charter capital.

Earlier, HAG shares had been put on a warning list and made ineligible for margin trading after auditors had a qualified opinion for the firm's 2017 consolidated financial statements.

A qualified opinion is a statement issued after an audit is completed by a professional auditor, suggesting that the information provided is limited in scope and/or the company being edited has not maintained generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), according to Investopedia, the world’s leading source of financial content on the web.

Duc had told shareholders at the annual general meeting on June 23 that he would buy more shares.

One month earlier, after HAG dropped to a 10-year low of VND4,420 ($0.19), he registered to buy 20 million shares, but only bought 4.8 million shares because of financial constraints.

In the first quarter of this year HAG reported net profits of VND56.6 billion ($2.47 million), a 3.5-fold increase year-on-year on revenues of VND1.03 trillion ($45 million), up 25 percent.