Peter Hargreaves sells £300m of Hargreaves Lansdown shares

Peter Hargreaves has sold £300m of shares in Hargreaves Lansdown, leaving him owning less than 20% of the company he co-founded 30 years ago.

Hargreaves said he had sold 19,543,974 of the investment platform's shares at £15.35 each to institutional investors. After the offering the self-made billionaire owns 19.8% of the FTSE 100 group's shares.

Before the placing Hargreaves owned about 24% of the company he started from a spare bedroom in Bristol in 1981. Hargreaves Lansdown shares fell 7.1% to £15.35 at 08:42 GMT and were the biggest fallers in the FTSE 100 index.

Hargreaves has now sold almost £1bn of the company's shares in the past year after unloading £550m in early February 2020. At the time he said the sale was part of his long-term plan to diversify assets and that he would remain a substantial shareholder in Hargreaves Lansdown.

The placing was announced after the market closed on Tuesday. The shares were little changed from a year earlier before the announcement after recovering from a low of £15.58 at the market low in March.