Man City owner sells Barclays stake

One of the Middle Eastern investors who helped save Barclays during the darkest days of the financial crisis has sold a large chunk of his stake in the British bank. In a statement issued after the end of play in London last night, the PCP Gulf Invest 3 fund said it had completed a complicated derivative deal that included the exercise of its remaining 131.6m warrants in Barclays and sale of 220m shares.PCP3, an investment vehicle linked to Abu Dhabi royal and Manchester City football club owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, asked investment bank Nomura to sell the Barclays shares at between 290p and 295p, worth about £650m.The move is part of a series of deals with Nomura to protect the value of PCP3's warrants and complete the hedging of its entire interest in the lender. "The exercise and hedging mark the final completion of a strategy that locks in a significant gain on Barclays plc shares for PCP3 while retaining further upside," it said. "PCP3 will seek to continue to maintain a close commercial and strategic relationship with Barclays in the future." Most of PCP3's 758m warrants in Barclays, exercisable at 197.7p each, were converted into shares in February and a sale of mandatorily convertible notes in June made the Sheikh about £1.5bn.A group of investors from the Middle East pumped £5.3bn into Barclays towards the end of 2008 when other banks were going cap in hand to the government.