GBL declares 60% of the voting rights, and close to eleven points are carried by GBL itself

A twenty-line transparency form can look like something for lawyers alone. The story it tells is very concrete: GBL buys back its own shares, and those buybacks move the regulatory snapshot of its controlling shareholder base. To make sense of the 60% figure, you first have to separate three things that everyday language runs together: the capital, the voting rights, and the votes that can actually be cast.

First trap: the 60% is voting rights, not capital

GBL has 129.8 million shares at 30 June 2026. They do not all give exactly the same number of votes. Since 2020, a registered share held without interruption for at least two years in the name of the same shareholder can carry a double voting right.

That is why Pargesa can be about 35.1% of the capital at 30 June and about 48.6% of the voting rights. The difference is not cosmetic: at GBL, a percentage of capital and a percentage of voting rights are two different pieces of information.

The two percentages are not measured at the same date. They are here to illustrate the mechanism; they must not be subtracted from one another as though the difference were a change.

The real correction: the 60% does not break down into "Pargesa, GBL, and many others"

The notification lists Pargesa, GBL, Sagerpar, FINPAR II through FINPAR XII, and several individuals and family holding companies. Read as twenty lines, it can give the impression of a very fragmented structure.

That would mislead. GBL's reports show that the FINPAR entities are vehicles controlled by the group, and GBL explicitly describes FINPAR XII as a subsidiary in its 2026 documents. So it is more useful to group the voting rights by their economic reality.

Why does the threshold rise if the families are not necessarily buying more?

The notification answers that itself: the threshold was crossed on 25 August following the buybacks of own shares by GBL and its subsidiary Sagerpar.

GBL buys shares on the market. Part of those securities ends up at GBL, at Sagerpar or in group vehicles. Because those entities are included in the concert's notification, the declared share can rise without a single member of the controlling families having personally bought anything.

The buybacks have become a material component of the capital

At 21 August, a few days before the notification, GBL reports holding 10,996,679 own shares, or 8.5% of the issued capital. Its eighth buyback envelope was 57.6% executed.

Be careful not to mix the measures. The 8.5% is a proportion of the capital, in own shares. The 10.84% in the chart above is a proportion of the voting rights carried in the form for GBL, Sagerpar and the FINPAR entities. Neither the bases nor the dates are the same.

Second trap: declared voting rights are not votes that can be cast

GBL states on its website that the voting rights attached to shares held by the company itself or by its subsidiaries are suspended. That creates an important distinction between the regulatory denominator used for transparency declarations and the number of votes that can actually be cast at a shareholders' meeting.

So the notification of 26 August answers one precise question: what share of the voting rights, in the sense of the transparency law, attaches to the concert? It does not, on its own, support the statement that the concert holds 60% of the votes that can be cast at the next meeting.

60% declared is an exact figure inside its regulatory frame. It is not a universal shorthand for "60% of the capital" or "60% of the votes at the meeting".

The structure turns out to be simpler than the form

Pargesa carries most of the block. Around it, a significant part of the declared percentage sits at GBL and its vehicles. The individuals and other family holding companies outside that subset come to only about 0.52% of the denominator.

That grouping matters editorially: it avoids giving twenty rows of a table to a structure whose economic reality fits in three blocks. Good simplification does not remove complexity, it files it in the right place.

What the notification actually says

The regulatory fact is that the concert around Pargesa crosses 60% of the voting rights. The economic story is that GBL's own share buybacks change the snapshot of the controlling shareholder base.

Once the control chain is rebuilt, the figure means something else: about 48.6 points come from Pargesa, close to 10.8 points from GBL and its own vehicles, and barely half a point from the other members of the concert.

A reader does not need to memorise twenty companies. A reader needs to understand why the percentage moves, and what it actually measures.