Bytes Technology boss Neil Murphy has quit after being caught flogging shares on the sly, according to news24.com.
The JSE-listed outfit, which sells software to the public sector, admitted that some of Murphy’s trades were not reported to the market as they should have been, and it was trying to find out what happened.
Murphy, who had been with Bytes since 2019, claimed that his stake in the company was the same as he had declared on 28 November, when he said he owned 2.9 million shares or 0.8 per cent of the total.
Sources told news24.com that he had sold off a chunk of his shares in December when the price was at a record high and then repurchased them in January when it had fallen by 20 per cent.
Murphy will be replaced by Sam Mudd, the boss of Bytes’ subsidiary Phoenix Software, which specialises in Microsoft products.
Bytes announced in October that it had made a billion quid in the first half of the year thanks to winning some lucrative contracts from the government. Its gross invoiced income (GII) had soared by 38 per cent, reaching £1.082 billion. Most of this came from selling Microsoft licences to public sector bodies, which boosted its GII by 44.4 per cent. Its revenues were also up by 16.3 per cent, hitting £108.7million.
