Metcash's departing CEO, Ian Morrice, has a bit of housework to do before he saunters out the door some time before Christmas.

His replacement, former Tesco executive Jeff Adams, will join in September and Morrice will have to show him the ropes – assuming Adams is lucky enough to nab one of those troublesome 457 visas.

And this week there were those pesky Metcash shares to dispose of.

On Monday, Morrice dumped most of his stock, selling 275,000 shares at $2.50 each.

It leaves Morrice with just 27,517 shares, plus 2.3 million performance options if he fancies his chances with the grocery group's October half-year results.

CBD is told that Morrice's fellow shareholders should not be too worried about the boss cashing out before his exit.

Apparently he needs the cash to build a retirement home – which means he might be investing a lot of it at the Home Timber & Hardware business he helped Metcash acquire last year to reduce the group's dependence on the wholesale grocery business.

Morrice did well out of his stock.

Showing he is a man who backs himself, Morrice picked up 180,000 shares in January 2015 at just over $1 each in October 2015 –  when it looked as if Metcash would be eaten alive by Coles, Woolies and Aldi.

Stocker shock

Speaking of shares, Metcash had better be careful with any stock it awards to its new CEO when he arrives in a few weeks.

CBD found some British reports from a decade back detailing a spot of bother at Tesco when it awarded its high-performing American executive Jeffrey Knapp Adams some 44,000 shares while he was helping to run its doomed US business.

The problem was, the shares ended up with another Jeffrey Adams – a lowly Tesco shop assistant from Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire.

Our shop assistant received the shares in 2002. Temptation got the better of the lowly paid Adams who had sold all the stock for £100,000 by 2005.

The other Adams stumbled across the problem seven years after the fact when he tried to sell the shares in order to buy a home in California where Tesco's American operations were based.

Jeffrey Knapp Adams received his shares while his British namesake received two years' gaol, according to the reports.

$33m shades of Gray

Some investors had reason to be happier than others when Japan's Persol offered a jackpot-like $778 million for Programmed Maintenance Services last week. It offered $3.02 a share, a 68 per cent premium to the stock's previous price of $1.80.

Just days before, the Simon Mawhinney-run fund manager, Allan Gray, picked up more than 6.5 million shares at less than $1.80.

But its good fortune began two months earlier when Allan Gray began building its stake from zero. By the time of the bid it had grabbed more than 10 per cent of Programmed's issued stock.

The shares it acquired for $47 million in the two months leading up to the takeover bid are now worth about $79 million, which would be sending the champagne corks popping at its Martin Place headquarters.

Not too many, of course. It was pointed out to CBD that the investment represented roughly 1 per cent of Allan Gray's funds under management.

Well hard

Luckless cattle exporter, Mauro Balzarini's Wellard, took another hammering after it reported that it would sink further into the red thanks to high cattle prices tempering demand in Asia.

Balzarini – who owns 83 million shares – made a fortune after helping Wellard raise $334 million from investors in December 2015 at $1.39 a share.

But the cow shipper's maiden voyage quickly hit the rocks with ship breakdowns and rising cattle prices.

Wednesday's news sent the stock to a fresh low of 14¢, which means even its white knight investor, Paul Holmes a Court, is significantly under water on his investment earlier this year.

It makes you wonder what Paul's father – legendary corporate raider Robert Holmes a Court – would do in these circumstances.

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