Mark Mobius has started to sell down his stake in the Mobius (MMIT ) emerging markets investment trust after announcing his retirement in November.

In a stock market filing on 28 December, the 87-year-old – best known for running Templeton Emerging Markets (TEM ) for many years – disclosed he sold 418,496 Mobius shares at 128.5p earlier in the month.

He then offloaded a further 656 shares for 135p, giving him total proceeds of £540,746 and leaving him with an 11.7% stake in the £170m trust.

A second filing in the New Year showed Mobius disposed of a further two million shares – which would have netted him around £2.7m – reducing his stake to 10%, or 11.6 million shares.

A year ago Mobius was the second-largest shareholder, with a 14.3% stake, according to the trust’s annual report.

In a stock exchange notice announcing the trust’s five-year anniversary in October, the company said it had been notified that Mobius would step back from Mobius Capital Partners (MCP), which he co-founded with Carlos von Hardenberg in 2018 after the pair both left Franklin Templeton.

Hardenberg, the lead manager of Mobius, bought 800 shares in November at 127p. This lifted his ‘skin in the game’ to 1% of a trust that has established a commanding lead over rivals.

In the past five years Mobius – which focuses on mid-sized firms improving their ESG profiles – has provided a 45.3% total return to shareholders, beating the 25.4% average of global emerging markets trusts and the 19.1% from the MSCI Emerging Markets index.

The shares trade 7% below their underlying net asset value, wider than their average 3% discount of the past year but narrower than the average 11% deficit in its seven-strong sector.

The Allan and Gill Gray Foundation remains the largest shareholder in the trust with a 13% holding, according to Refinitiv data.