Stockhead senior journalist Rachel Williamson takes a weekly look at which small cap directors are buying and which are selling.

Grow your own fortune

The chairman of one of the ASX’s “grow-your-own-body-part” companies has forked out $805,000 on shares.

PolyNovo’s (ASX:PNV) David Williams spent that sum buying shares at 50c and 48c on market in the last days of April.

The first $700,000-odd worth of shares put a small rocket under the share price on April 27.

He now owns a 15.9 million share in the breast implant business.

Time to ante up

Kiwi renewables company Tilt (ASX:TLT) expects its directors to spend half their gross fees each month on  the company’s stock.

Under a mandatory fixed trading plan set up a year ago, directors are also not allowed to sell these shares until 12 months after they leave Tilt.

Chairman Bruce Harker has therefore been buying the same amount of shares on market every month for some time: between $8000 and $9000 a month.

Mr Harker now owns a solid 152,000 shares in Tilt partly collected under the “mandatory” scheme. But so far his is the only name regularly appearing under change of director interests.

Debt, gossip and deal-making

Hot Copper (ASX:HOT) director Gavin Argyle is the only director of the stock gossip forum to have bought the company’s stock since it listed in 2015.

He has done so three times. Mr Argyle bought $87,500 worth of shares last week, $212,000 in March and $148,000 in December.

Ensurance (ASX:ENA) is moving deeper into debt to its chairman Anthony Leibowitz.

The insurance company originally took out a $1 million loan with Mr Leibowitz, but as of last week that had risen to $2.5 million.

Ensurance has used its assets as security for the loan. The company itself is only worth $5 million.

Three of Alcidion’s (ASX:ALC) five directors bought big chunks of stock after it said it would acquire a $12 million patient-tracker business.

Chief Ray Blight bought 3 million shares, Rebecca Wilson bought 570,000, and Geoff Rohrsheim bought 1 million.

“I am pleased to increase my position as a shareholder, and to welcome two of our directors as fellow shareholders of the company,” Mr Blight said. “It has been their intention to buy shares and, now that trading restrictions have been lifted, they have promptly followed through with this.”

Metals X (ASX:MLX) director Milan Jerkovic bought $200,000 of shares, lifting his stake by two-thirds to 367,500 shares.

Mr Jerkovic is the chair of gold miner Blackham Resources (ASX:BLK).

Stock sales

Bass Oil (ASX:BAS) director Mark Lindh sold $100,000 of stock last week.

At 0.4c a share, he had to sell a considerable amount to get that sum — 25 million shares, in fact.

He still owns 152.5 million shares — which at 0.4c is worth about $610,000.

It’s that dividend time of year

Dividends are the return du jour in May, and a series of directors are using them to add big chunks to their corporate holdings.

Four Freedom Foods (ASX:FNP) directors reinvested collective dividends of $8 million.

Three of those directors were from the billionaire Perich family: brothers Tony and Ron and the latter’s son Michael, who each re-invested $2.6 million.

The Croatian Perich family made their fortune in property and agriculture.

Making out like a Boss

Mark Hohnen was appointed chairman of uranium play Boss Resources two years ago — and as a reward for sticking around he’s just nabbed 2 million shares.

But if Boss shares keep heading in the current direction Mr Hohnen stands to earn a lot more shares.

In March Boss (ASX:BOE) raised $8 million to fund a study into returning a uranium project in South Australia to production — and its shares have since risen 30 per cent to 5.4c.

Mr Hohnen now has 20.6 million shares and — provided he hits milestones including presiding over the company after its share price stays above 8.5c for 20 consecutive days — stands to get another 14 million.

Mr Hohnen has not bought shares in the company since his initial buy-in of $500,000 in 2016.

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