Charter Financial Corp. in West Point, Ga., announced plans Friday to delist its stock and become a privately held company.
Robert L. Johnson, the president and chief executive officer of the $1.1 billion-asset company, said it is buying back its publicly traded shares to reduce the amount of time and money it must spend complying with regulations. Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, hundreds of small publicly traded companies, including dozens of banks, have gone private, citing added compliance costs.
Charter Financial is a mutual holding company whose structure gives the holding company 80% of the outstanding stock, with the rest owned by the public.
The company, which is listed on the Nasdaq stock market, plans to buy back one million shares of common stock for $43 to $52 per share between Nov. 21 and Dec. 20. Its goal is to reduce the number of shareholders to fewer than 300 and deregister its common stock.
Mr. Johnson said Charter Financial has about 300 shareholders now and could have gone private without the buyback but preferred to let investors get out of the stock if they want to. "We thought we would want to put a liquidity bid out there to let them exit gracefully," he said.
The company may consider going public again, he said, but offered no timetable. "It's beyond the horizon right now," he said.
