BOSSES at a bakery company rushed to reassure worried shareholders, many of them workers, after its share price mysteriously dived 14 per cent in a matter of hours.

Blackburn-based Inter Link Foods saw its price on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the alternative to the main Stock Market, drop from around £2.90 to around £2.50 on Tuesday for no apparent reason.

Inter Link, the holding company for Crossfield Foods, Blackburn, and other bakeries in Oldham and Nottingham, took advice and issued a statement to reassure shareholders. The price recovered 15p to end the day at £2.65.

Chief executive Alwin Thompson (pictured) said: "The share price has been dealing consistently around the £3 mark. It began to fall until it reached around £2.50. We spoke to our advisers and no-one knows why it happened.

"It seemed sensible at 2.30pm to reassure people and advise them there was nothing from a trading point of view, nothing from a company point of view, to say that things are any different from the position at the AGM. We decided to inform rather than ignore."

The annual meeting in September heard sales in the first quarter were 33 per cent up on the same period last year and that unaudited pre-tax profits were ahead 40 per cent.

The directors confirmed the group, which employs 270 people at its three sites, continued to perform in line with expectations.

The group will open a new 30,000sq ft factory in Shadsworth, Blackburn, in January, creating up to 150 new jobs over the next two years. Its Crossfield Street site will continue to operate.

The company started trading on the AIM in August 1998 at £1.10 per ordinary share. It started with around 100 mainly institutional shareholders but now has more than 500 shareholders, mostly workers or private investors.

Inter Link sells a range of cakes to major supermarket chains.