Fresh ESOP at Sampath Bank

The Board of Directors of Sampath Bank Plc decided at its Board Meeting held on 27 January 2011, to introduce an Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) for 2011 conditional upon the bank achieving certain performance criteria for 2011.

Under the proposed ESOP new shares up to 2% of the existing number of 152,807,972 will be created, which would be offered to the eligible staff upon bank achieving the set targets.

The offer price would be volume weighted average price of Sampath Bank shares during the last week of January 2011, less a discount of 10%.  The vesting period of the ESOP will be from one year after the offer date of 1 April 2011, which would end on 1 April 2012. The option exercisable period will be three years from 1 April 2012. No financial assistance would be provided by the bank to the staff to acquire shares under the proposed ESOP. However, the proposed ESOP would be subject to the CSE and shareholder approval to be obtained.

At present the Bank has an ESOP for which the Sampath Bank Employees’ Share Trusts namely, Sampath Trust, Sampath Team Trust & Sampath Middle Management Trust have been set up. This is in line with the Articles of the bank which empowers the directors to create an ESOP and 6,536,800 shares were purchased for this purpose, to be allocated to employees. However, this ESOP involved a loan of Rs. 518 million as at end 2009.