SiliconBeat

Anacor Pharmaceuticals, a Palo Alto drug development company, registered plans Friday with the SEC for an initial public offering of its stock, initially estimated to raise $57.5 million.

The company is led by David Perry, who founded Chemdex in 1997 when he was barely 30. Chemdex was a shooting star among the hot sector of so-called business-to-business Internet stocks in the late 90s. It created an electronic marketplace where scientists and others could purchase chemicals and lab equipment.

Chemdex shares soared 70 percent on their first day of trading in July 1999. Its stock
price skyrocketed more than another 800 percent in early 2000 only to see it lose more than 99 percent of its value by the end of the year in the wake of the dot.com bust.
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EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman has returned to the ranks of the company’s inside sellers this year for the first time since 2003, according to Thomson Financial.

Her latest trades took place at the height of the recent stock market gyrations on Aug. 9, a day the Dow dropped 387 points, or 2.8 percent on credit worries, and Aug. 10, the day the Federal Reserve injected billions of dollars of extra liquidity into the financial system, helping cut the Dow’s loss that day to 31 points, or 0.2 percent.

Whitman exercised options to buy 320,000 shares of eBay stock at $10.02 per share both days and then sold them at prices ranging from $35.63 to $36.75. The trades left her with a profit of $16.75 million.

Good timing or bad?
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Ok,  we confess. Sometimes slogging through dozens of securities filings isn’t as thrilling and sexy as you probably think. But then you come across the letters like the one that PDL BioPharma got from a shareholder on Wednesday.

If you’ve to a few minutes, it’s worth reading in full here. Actually, it’s just a press release today, but will probably be filed with the SEC by tomorrow. But why quibble?

The letter is from Daniel S. Loeb, manger of Third Point investment fund, and one of PDL’s biggest shareholders. The sheer venom, the seething anger, you can practically feel Loeb’s blood pressure rising as he dictated this missive to some underling.

For months, Loeb hounded the former CEO Mark McDade until he resigned last week. And Loeb had been pushing for a sale of some or all of the company. The company responded by announcing the sale of a unit yesterday.

So Loeb must be much happier, right? Ha! Not on your life.

Now he wants chairman Patrick Gage out.

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Seagate shares led a rally in technology shares Wednesday a day after the world’s largest maker of hard-disk drives boosted its profit and revenue forecasts for its fiscal 2008 first quarter.

That could spell good news for Seagate’s top executives to counter the bad news they got the week before.

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Calpine, the troubled San Jose power company struggling to climb out of bankruptcy
proceedings, announced last Friday that its executive vice president for commercial
operations, Thomas N. May, “”will be leaving the company effective immediately.” May, who joined Calpine 15 months ago, was paid $500,000 a year, given a sign-on bonus of $500,000 and guaranteed another $500,000 as a minimum bonus for the final seven months of 2006.

No explanation for the sudden departure was given. The terse notice of May’s termination said he “”will be entitled to certain benefits provided under his employment agreement,” without detailing exactly what those would be.

In May’s employment agreement letter in May 2006 the company said he he would be eligible for a so-called success fee following the company’s emergence from bankruptcy to be determined by the company’s chief executive.

However, if Calpine terminated his employment without cause or if he terminated his
employment with good reason, before a confirmed plan of reorganization became effective, he is entitled to receive a minimum success fee of $1 million.

Among the “good” reasons he might quit would be a material change in his duties, the company’s breach of or failure to renew his contract.

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It’s never a good thing when you look on a chart of your stock price, and the line moved down at a 90 degree angle one day. But such is life at Ditech Networks, the Mountain View communications equipment maker.

Earlier this month, Ditech shares dropped 25 percent in one day after the company cuts it earnings outlook for the first quarter. Then, on August 15, the company announced that Timothy K. Montgomery, Ditech’s chief executive officer and president, was being put out pasture. He was temporarily replaced by Edwin L. Harper.

Technically, Montgomery is retiring. The company said it was still working out the terms of his retirement, but promised us an 8-K with all the gory details. Yipee! So we eagerly await that. In the meantime, he’ll get a cash salary of $2,000 per day. Yes, PER DAY. And he can buy $25,000 worth of Ditech options. And since the stock at $5.06 per share, that’s not nothing.

Which brings us around to today. The company is engaging in one of the most popular ways to prop up an ailing stock price. In an 8-K filed Wednesday, Ditech said its board approved a plan to buy back 9,100,000 shares out of about 33 million. The company will do it Dutch Auction style, which appears to be the favorite way for Valley companies to do such things these days. Essentially, the company will by back any stock that shareholders offer at prices ranging from $4.90 to $5.50. The company said that means it could spend any where from $44.6 million to $50.1 million.

And then, everything will be all better.

We wrote just last week about the bitter fight at PDL Bio Pharma that led CEO Mark McDade to step aside. Now comes word that the company may send as many as 250 employees to keep McDade from getting lonely.

In a story today by our colleague Steve Johnson, PDL announced the layoffs and said that it will refocus its goals. Steve’s story notes:

“A PDL press release Tuesday said the change in focus would result in “a sizable workforce reduction” at the company, which now has about 1,100 employees. Rinehart said PDL hasn’t yet determined how many workers will lose their jobs. But she said the layoffs will immediately hit at least 250 people involved with the products the company hopes to sell this year or early next year.”

Guy Adams, a hedge fund manager from Pasadena who engineered a dissident shareholders takeover of Exar in 2005, will resign from the chip developers board in September, the company said in a press release Monday. The move came shortly after Exar’s acquisition of Sipex, another supplier of analog chip, was completed on Friday. The stock is down 6 percent so far this week.

“When I began the proxy contest, I had three main goals,” Adams said in a statement. “The first was to improve Exar’s corporate governance, which we have done with great success. This Board has worked to declassify the Board, reduce overall Management and Director compensation, reduce the size of the option plan, prohibit option repricings, and introduce performance and restricted stock units with long-term goals and cliff vesting.”

As Mercury News reporter Therese Poletti wrote at the time the dissidents won their proxy fight, among the directors who were ousted were Richard Koppes, former general counsel for the California Public Employees Retirement System and a well-known expert on corporate governance; Richard Previte, a former president of Advanced Micro Devices; and Thomas Werner, chief executive of SunPower, then a subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor.

In fiscal 2007, Adams received a cash fee of $45,000 for serving on the board and a combination of restricted stock and stock options the company valued at $158,978. The year before Adams was paid a $40,000 fee and received an option to buy 54,000 shares.

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I wrote a story in today’s Mercury News looking at the big change in fortune at Echelon, the San Jose appliance networking company, and how CEO Ken Oshman’s decision to stick it out for two decades may be about to pay off. You can read the whole thing here. And if that leaves you begging for more, you can listen to the podcast that I did to go with it.

But one subject I didn’t touch on in the story was stock sales. With Echelon’s stock price up about 200 percent this year, it’s not surprising that more insiders are selling more stock. In 2007, insiders have sold $5.9 million worth of stock, compared to Zero in 2006, and $494,411 in 2005.

But here’s something that is surprising, nay, downright shocking: Oshman has never sold a single share of stock in almost two decades of running the company. He still holds 6,050,183 shares, or 15.1 percent. Oshman is financially secure from his previous gig, running ROLM, a telecom company that IBM bought in 1984. Still, it’s amazing.

Since the company went public in 1998, insiders have sold $44.6 million worth of stock, hardly a bonanza by Valley standards. The big winners include Motorola, an early investor, which sold about $13 million worth of stock early on.

As far as insiders go, Beatrice Yormark, chief operating officer, has sold $4.9 million worth of stock. And Oliver Stanfield, chief financial officer, has sold $6.6 million. Yormark has been at Echelon since 1990, while Stanfield has been there over a decade.

Selectica filed an 8-K Monday, making its Friday press release regarding the replacement of its chief executive because of his involvement and/or awareness with stock option backdating practices an official part of its SEC record.

Included is the employment agreement with the company’s new CEO, Robert Jurkowski., who will receive a $360,000 yearly salary and a target bonus of $90,000. He will be granted an option for 600,000 shares “as soon as reasonably practicable on or after the date of this Agreement”, which was dated Aug. 21.

So far, no Form 4 filing has landed regarding the option grant. Selectica shares hit a 52-week low of $1.42 earlier this month and closed at $1.46 on the date the agreement was made. In the meantime the shares have risen 13 percent and closed at $1.65 today. Ouch.

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