Vallibel One PLC has raised its direct holding in The Fortress Resorts PLC to 49.93% of issued shares, buying 34,747,249 shares in market transactions on 21 October.
The company disclosed the purchase to the Colombo Stock Exchange, EconomyNext reported on Thursday. Together with holdings already in the hands of its subsidiaries L B Finance PLC and Royal Ceramics Lanka PLC, the group’s interest in the resort operator stands at 53.89%.
The sellers are inside the same group
The notable feature of the transaction is who sold. The shares came from Vallibel Leisure (Pvt) Ltd — described by EconomyNext as another Vallibel One subsidiary — and from Dhammika Perera, the businessman behind the group.
So this is not an acquisition of new economic interest. The group’s combined stake was already above half; what has changed is where the shares sit. A holding dispersed across a private subsidiary and an individual has been consolidated onto the balance sheet of the listed parent, where it is visible to Vallibel One’s own minority shareholders and counted in its accounts.
Two numbers worth noting
The arithmetic leaves 3.96 percentage points of the group’s 53.89% still held through L B Finance and Royal Ceramics rather than directly.
And the direct holding has stopped at 49.93% — seven hundredths of a percentage point below half. On a purchase of 34.7 million shares, landing that close to 50% without crossing it is unlikely to be incidental. EconomyNext does not say whether the level was deliberate, and does not address whether any disclosure or mandatory-offer threshold is engaged by the transaction.
Not reported
The filing as reported gives no price and no consideration — neither a per-share figure nor a total value — so the sum paid by the listed company to its own subsidiary and chairman is not public from this account. There is no split of how many of the 34,747,249 shares came from Vallibel Leisure and how many from Perera, no statement of either seller’s residual holding, and no stated commercial rationale. The Fortress Resorts board has not commented.
Single-source. EconomyNext linked the underlying CSE disclosures directly, but cdn.cse.lk is unreachable from this desk — both the Jina reader and a direct request returned no usable document — so the primary filing could not be read. Searches of Daily FT, the Daily Mirror’s business pages, Lanka Business Online, the Island, the Sunday Times and NewsFirst found no other verified newsroom reporting the transaction at the time of writing; same-day CSE disclosures are typically picked up by other desks the following morning.