My recollections from my own personal experiences are that the options are issued to key employees as a retention bonus and they are registered on the company books to that employee. When I received my free options I think those options expired worthless if you left the company before a specified date but the specified date was not the exercise date. The options are issued to a specific person to be exercised by a specified date and if they are not exercised then they expire worthless. When we were issued our options, anyone commencing employment within X amount of days of the issue missed out as you needed to be an employee for a certain period of time so I think it highly unlikely and highly illegal if FAR dished off these options to third parties. BUT, I do seem to recall reading on HC over the years where speculators would offer option holders X amount of dollars for their options for them to sign them over to them. Obviously the employment retention date would have needed to be served and the options vested into that persons name by the Share Registry Service and the person being approached either needed the money, had little confidence in them being in the money or did not have the funds to exercise their full entitlement. Another words, if an employee of FAR in 2015 was approached by such a speculator they would receive a payment to transfer their entitlements over to them and the speculator would take the risk of whether they were in the money or not.
Now after you posted about the 48M 4.4c options I looked at the 3B's and FAR are saying all options were exercised. Only 17M were exercised by Directors so the others would have been exercised by the key employees or the speculator they offloaded the options to and you are right in your thinking that some maybe lots were sold up to and after 30 June which would have split the CGT fee over two financial years. Then again, those not needing the money would hold until May 28th 2017 to get the 50% CGT benefit. So what we can gleen from the 3B is that the directors who exercised their 17M options, still hold those shares as no change of directors notice has been issued and potentially 31M shares or part there of could have found their way in to the market.
The one director who received 12M options made a snappy $600K as soon as he handed over the cheque to the share registry. Now that's a house in 6 of the 8 Aussie states and territories.
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