However, the share placing was poorly received and the company's broker, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, was forced to scale back the sale from the planned 350 million shares.. The duo who turned a tile shop into a national chain with funds from one of their wives' hairdressing business are to pocket about £10m each from the first share buy-back in the company's quoted history. Topps Tiles, which has 260 UK outlets, unveiled plans yesterday to hand back £122.4m to its shareholders because it is generating more cash than it can spend. Barry Bester, who owns 8 per cent of the group, and Stuart Williams, who has a 9 per cent stake, will be the biggest beneficiaries of the cash handout. Shareholders will get 54p for every share they own in the first buy-back since the group floated in 1997. Topps' origins date to a Manchester-based tile shop that was opened in 1965 by Ted Derbyshire.

He sold out in 1995 to Messrs Bester and Williams, who used their Tile Kingdom to create the country's biggest tile chain. A windfall from Mrs Bester's hairdressing business bankrolled the original chain.Nick Ounstead, Topps' chief executive, said investors had been calling on the board to hand back some cash. The shares rose 12.5p to 243.5p yesterday.Topps has net cash of £26m and will gear up to fund the buy-back It spends about £4.5m on annual capital expenditure. "It's very much still in their interest to drive the business forward," the spokesman said.Despite the news, Panmure Gordon advised investors to buy the stock and stuck to its 225p price target.The four founders - Anurag Dikshit, Vikrant Bhargava, Ruth Parasol and her husband, Russell DeLeon - caused controversy a month ago when they sold 200 million of shares before the official lock-up period expired at the end of June.

He pointed out that Mr Weigold is due to receive 9.5 million share options, which vest on a quarterly basis, until the end of 2009 while Mr Abdoo is also in line for a "substantial" number of options. Mr Weigold and Mr Abdoo offloaded all of their holdings and raised £3.2m and £1.98m respectively. They received their shares free at the flotation in June last year while Mr Jackson bought his shares. As the departing chairman of Sage, he also sold 100,000 shares in that company at 236p on Tuesday.A spokesman for the company said Mr Jackson sold shares to cover his tax liabilities while the other two directors wanted to diversify their portfolios. The news pushed the online poker giant's shares down 3.5 per cent to 112p yesterday as other investors followed suit. PartyGaming announced that Michael Jackson, the chairman, Martin Weigold, the finance director, and David Abdoo, the company secretary, had sold a total 4.5 million shares at 116p apiece the previous day.The sales come two weeks before the company issues its second-quarter trading update.Mr Jackson raised £304,000 and was left with 600,000 shares. HMV has also secured deals with suppliers to lower prices without reducing profits margins excessively.. Three directors of PartyGaming decided to cash in some of their share holdings for a total of £5.5m just a month after the company's four founders sold a 5 per cent stake in the business.

A company spokeswoman said: "It has been so successful that HMV has seen an 8.4% uplift in sales at those stores, and a dramatic increase in footfall. "Not only has there been work on pricing but there has also been quite a lot of work on the store layout as well." HMV said wider aisles and a more open shop front attracted more customers and encouraged them to move right to the back of the stores, where its back catalogue - "the bedrock of HMV" - is kept. "The most popular entertainment and book titles were impacted by rapidly growing competition from supermarkets, while a pronounced shift in consumer preference to buying online put pressure on the deeper range of product," he said. HMV said sales were particularly badly hit in June by the football World Cup, with England's Saturday games keeping people off the high street It also blamed a lack of big new book or music releases. But it said it was confident that the roll out of its new music store format tested in South Wales and Kingston-upon-Thames will boost sales and profits in future. The new format revolves around a simpler store layout and major price cuts, which has seen the price of chart CDs slashed to £9.95, while DVDs have been reduced to £14.95. HMV said it will look for further growth at hmv.co.uk where sales have more than doubled and will launch waterstones this autumn.

Chairman Carl Symon said the UK retail market was "highly demanding" last year. Operationally, the Maidenhead-based group unveiled plans to roll out a new store format which it had been piloting at HMV in South Wales and Kingston upon Thames. "However, we are making excellent progress with a two-year programme of initiatives which we anticipate will begin to improve performance during the crucial Christmas trading period and ultimately transform the group into a world class multi-channel retailer." HMV said that, despite the "challenging conditions", it will raise its annual dividend by almost 9% to 7.4p a share and return up to £100 million to shareholders in the next two years through share buybacks. It also said it expected to make cost savings of £10 million from the acquisition of bookshop Ottakar's, which it agreed to buy for almost £63 million in May. HMV chief executive Alan Giles said: "As we expected, trading conditions in the first few weeks of the new financial year have remained difficult.