Barclays bank has been left with some €700m worth of shares in Dutch cable company Ziggo after a flopped 20% stake sale by its private equity owners Cinven and Warburg Pincus.

At the beginning of this week, Cinven and Warburg Pincus said they would sell 40 million shares in the Dutch cable and telecom group. Barclays took them over to sell at €25.05, just 80 cents below Ziggo’s share price at the time.

‘If you undercut the price by 3%, you are wasting your time,’ one anonymous trader told the Financieele Dagblad. ‘Very few professionals subscribed.’

Ziggo was launched on the Amsterdam midcap exchange a year ago and is currently trading at around €24.40.

Barclays registered its 14% holding with market regulator AFM on Friday in line with Dutch major shareholding disclosure rules.