Graphene firm may sue broker after Aim listing

Hume, which is also listed on Aim and is valued at £5.4m, made more than £300,000 from the Haydale float.

It received a corporate finance fee of £25,000 and a commission of 5pc of the placed shares, worth £330,000 – though £22,250 of that was paid to Evesco International Business Services as a sub-commission.

Hume was also granted warrants over 94,286 Haydale shares, representing 0.84pc of its share capital.

Haydale is understood to have asked its lawyers, Field Fisher Waterhouse, to examine whether there are grounds for a legal claim against Hume, including for a possible breach of contract, and whether it can reclaim some of the fees.

Asked if Hume should return some of its fees, its chief executive Nitin Parekh said: “Absolutely not at all. I don’t think we’ve done a bad job at all. Our fees are standard in the industry.”

He added: “Market-making is not a pre-requisite for floating a company. Although we are not making a market in it, we are extremely supportive of the company.”

Mr Parekh said Hume had been reviewing its market-making activities “for some time” but refused to say when he had told Haydale that the broker was pulling out. “I am not going to answer that question,” he said.

He attributed Haydale’s tricky start on the public markets to “people shorting the stock” and the fact that “we probably missed our float timing by about three weeks”, given that technology companies had recently had “a pretty rough ride”.

Asked if Hume was pulling out of market-making because it lacked the capital to support it, Mr Parekh stressed the broker merely saw better returns elsewhere.

“We have only temporarily stopped our market-making activities,” he said. “We have never been in ruder health.”

He pointed to Hume’s stock exchange announcement last week, in which it said it expected half-year results to show a “significant improvement over the same period last year”.

A spokesman for Haydale declined to comment.

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