Ryanair trio in share windfalls

Three senior figures at Ryanair made substantial windfalls last week from the sale of shares in the airline.

Documents filed with the Irish Stock Exchange show chief operating officer Michael Cawley and chief financial officer Howard Millar each made a gain of €2.61 million on November 9th by exercising 1.52 million share options and selling them on immediately.

Separately, Ryanair’s non-executive director James Osborne earned €980,000 on November 7th by selling 200,000 shares at €4.90 each.

This left Mr Osborne, who has been a director of Ryanair since 1995, with 310,526 shares in the company. These have a paper value of €1.4 million.

Mr Osborne also has 25,000 share options, which are exercisable between June 2013 and June 2015 at €4.96 each.

Details of the transactions were lodged with the stock exchange late in the evening on November 9th.

Mr Cawley and Mr Millar each paid €3.21 a share to exercise their options. This cost them just under €4.9 million each. They then each sold 1.37 million shares at €4.926 apiece and 150,000 shares at €4.95 each.

This netted the executives an aggregate €7.5 million each.

In addition to their executive roles, Mr Cawley and Mr Millar act as joint deputy chief executive to Michael O’Leary. As neither Mr Cawley nor Mr Millar is an executive director of Ryanair, their individual shareholdings and share options are not listed in the airline’s annual report.