I was in the same boat with you until a few days ago when...

I was in the same boat with you until a few days ago when @madamswer kindly explained it to me. And now I understand how this really shouldn't be allowed. Essentially it is preferential treatment to the directors. If they wanted to get that volume of shares, they should buy it like everyone else which would not result in them having such a low average buy price, and would significantly increase the share price on the market. Why should they get any preferential treatment compared to any other shareholder of the company? In fact, the share holders (owners) employ them so technically the employees get a discount?

Either way, the exact same thing happened in another stock that recently did a raise. Is this a relatively common occurrence? I guess the one positive we can see from this is that it does show management support for the company by having skin in the game. Just the method of doing so is unscrupulous.