Shares in Barclays fell as much as 6% in earlier trade today, after one of its top investors offloaded a $1.2 billion chunk of stock in the lender at a discount overnight.
An unnamed investor sold 599 million shares yesterday evening, facilitated by Goldman Sachs. The shares are roughly equivalent to a 3.6% stake, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.
The sale deals a further blow to Barclays just a day after it disclosed a compliance blunder leading to an estimated £450m loss for overselling structured products in the US. The bank's shares had sank 4% yesterday.
Capital Group offloaded 399 million shares yesterday, according to Eikon data, but it was unclear whether the sale was connected to the transaction managed by Goldman Sachs.
Capital Group is one of the world's largest investment firms, and parent to the American Funds brand that is popular among millions of US investors and retirement savers. It declined to comment.
Other top Barclays shareholders with around a 3% stake in the lender include the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Blackrock, according to Eikon data.
Blackrock declined to comment when approached by Reuters yesterday, while QIA was not immediately available for comment.
QIA last week offloaded 1.2% of miner and commodity trader Glencore for about $1.04 billion.
The Barclays sale was priced at 150 pence today, towards the top of the target range of 147.50 pence to 150.75 pence.
But this still represented a discount greater than 6% to Monday's closing price, pressuring the share price.
The sale was slightly bigger than the 575 million shares outlined yestereday evening, netting the seller £899m, a person involved in the deal told Reuters, adding the book was multiple times oversubscribed.
Barclays said this week it would have to delay a planned £1 billion share buyback because of the structured products loss, which it will have to incur as a result of buying back the securities in question at their original purchase price.
The regulatory blunder is an early test for CS Venkatakrishnan, the newly-appointed chief executive of Barclays, whose previous roles included heading the bank's global markets and risk operations.
