Aviva (LON:AV) shares edged up on Tuesday morning, after the insurance group announced it would begin a £600 million share buyback of its ordinary shares.
The group has already pledged to deploy £2 billion of excess of capital in 2018, including debt reduction and acquisitions. The share buyback programme will begin today, Tuesday 1st May, and will likely run until the end of this year.
“The deployment includes £900 million of debt reduction, £500 million for bolt-on acquisitions (close to £100 million has already been committed to the acquisition of Friends First in Ireland) and a £600 million ordinary share buy-back,” Aviva said.
The announcement comes just after the firm said over the weekend that it would make about £14 million of ‘goodwill’ payments to investors who lost money selling preference shares in March. Aviva had proposed to cancel the high-yielding stocks, sending the price down sharply. 2,000 private and institutional investors are set to get a payout of around £7,000 each.
“We recognise that whilst we were considering our options for the preference shares this caused uncertainty and led some investors to sell their shares,” said Mark Wilson, Aviva chief executive.
“The board and I want to do the right thing and make this goodwill payment.”
Aviva shares are currently trading up 1.17 percent at 535.20 (0826GMT).
