More than 80 per cent of the shares in recruitment group CPL will be held by the husband-and-wife team which founded the group 10 years ago when CPL begins trading on the AIM and DCM stock markets next month.

Ms Anne Heraty and her husband, Mr Paul Carroll, will each own just under 41 per cent of CPL and this is worth more than £9 million (€11.42 million) each at the placing price of €0.77 (£0.61) per share.

In a statement to the stock exchange, CPL says it is raising €4.62 million (£3.64 million) in a placing of six million shares at €0.77. A spokesman said half the money raised would come from new equity, with the other half being shares sold into the placing by Ms Heraty and Mr Carroll.

When CPL first announced its plans to go public two weeks ago, the group indicated that the two founder-directors would hold two-thirds of the equity when the placing was completed. The decision to release less than 20 per cent of the shares to institutional investors was taken because the company is cash-rich and because CPL is being floated at a higher valuation than was indicated a fortnight ago, a spokesman said.

At that time, it was indicated that the group would be worth around £20 million when it floated on DCM and AIM. The €0.77 (£0.61) per share flotation price now values CPL at E£27.1 million (£21.3 million).

A CPL spokesman said the placing with Irish and British institutions had been oversubscribed and that institutions would receive about two-thirds of the shares for which they applied. The free float of just over 18 per cent - one of the lowest levels of free floats on the market - will mean that liquidity in CPL shares will be virtually non-existent when they begin trading on the DCM and AIM markets.