Pantheon International (PIN ) has launched a £150m tender offer as the £1.5bn private equity fund looks to deliver on last month’s promise of buying back £200m of its heavily discounted shares this financial year.

Under a reverse auction, shareholders will be able to tender, or offer to sell back, their shares at prices of 2.5p increments between 280p and 315p. The company will set a strike price as the lowest it needs to pay to buy back all the shares on offer.

The trust’s shares closed on Friday at 294p, a 34% discount to their net asset value (NAV) of 452.5p on 31 July which gave the portfolio of private equity and unquoted company stakes a total value of £2.5bn.

Pantheon International’s board, which has bought back £7.3m of shares since its announcement last month, said the tender was an effective way to invest in its own portfolio at scale, while giving shareholders the liquidity with which to sell all their holdings if they wished.

It said shareholders who did not participate in the tender offer would benefit from the boost to NAV caused by repurchasing its shares at a ‘material discount’.

The offer closes at 1pm on 17 October and will be followed by further share buybacks to achieve its £200m target. No director on the board is participating. A circular with details of the offer is available on the company’s website.

In early trading, Pantheon International shares gained 8p, or 2.7%, to 301p. Despite their wide discount, the shares have risen 13% in the past year and by 41.6% in the past five years. However, that is far less than the underlying total investment return of 75.9% over five years, according to Numis Securities data.

Peel Hunt analyst Anthony Leatham said: ‘Given the current run-rate of buyback activity, it was not clear how successful PIN would be in meeting its objective of “up to £200m” buyback in FY24. This tender offer potentially accelerates the buyback process. The upper end of the pricing range represents a c31% discount to the end-August 2023 NAV.’