Akeena Solar’s share price and workforce got about 25 percent smaller Thursday after the Los Gatos solar power systems supplier and installer released results for its 2008 fourth quarter that missed analysts’ expectations.
While the company’s revenue came in as expected at $10.9 million, it posted a loss Read the rest of this entry »
Akeena Solar announced yesterday the resignation from its board of director George Lauro, who joined it less than 14 months ago and who was named as a director up for re-election in the company’s proxy filed last week.
Lauro “indicated that he wishes to focus his efforts on his other portfolio companies,” according to an SEC Akeena filed Wednesday. The resignation, which was effective immediately, leaves the company with only two independent directors on its board, a violation of Nasdaq’s listing requirement.
An electrical engineering graduate of Brown University, Lauro also has an M.B.A. from Wharton and has done graduate work in “Astronautics” from MIT. He also serves as a on the boards of ChipX and Pinyon Technologies.
Akeena Solar, the Los Gatos installer of solar systems to homeowners and small businesses, said in a filing late Friday afternoon that two days earlier its chief operating officer, James Curran, “advised the company he was tendering his resignation for personal reasons.”
Barry Cinnamon, chief executive at Akeena Solar of Los Gatos, will sell up to 700,000 of the company’s shares over the next year “to satisfy financial obligations incurred by Mr. Cinnamon as part of his 2006 Divorce Settlement,” according to a filing the company made with the SEC Monday.
Under his plan, “Mr. Cinnamon contemplates selling up to 700,000 shares of common stock over the course of the next year,” which would be equal to about 8 percent of his holdings of Akeena Solar stock and options.
Cinnamon, the company’s founder, started his career in solar energy in the late 1970s as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to his Akeena’s latest proxy. His work in solar-energy computer modeling led him into the software industry, where he served as CEO of Software Publishing and founded Allegro New Media, a multimedia software publisher.
Shares of Akeena Solar, which became a public company in August 2006 through a reverse merger with a Nevada corporation named Fairview Energy, have risen 150 percent so far this year.
On Friday, 942,000 shares of Akeena Solar traded hands, more than ten times the number the day before. By the end of the day shares of the Los Gatos designer and installer of solar power systems were up 19 percent, just shy of an all-time record. The price jump coincided with the company’s announcement that its chief financial officer was leaving, which we found curious.
Evidently some traders on Friday were prescient. Akeena shares jumped more than 10 percent again on Monday to their highest prices ever. The company announced that its stock, which had traded over-the-counter, would now be bought and sold on the Nasdaq Capital Market, beginning today.
Barry Cinnamon, the current CEO, was set to serve as interim CFO for the departing David “Lad” Wallace after his last day Sept. 28. The company said on Friday it was “working with Mr. Wallace to ensure an orderly and effective transition.”
Well, they worked fast. The company also announced today that it hired Gary Effren as its new chief financial officer. The name rang a special bell for us because, he use to work at Knight Ridder, which use to own The Mercury News, until it met an untimely death last year. Though they left that part out of the announcement.
For his part in managing the dissolution of KR, Effren received about $1.6 million for his Knight Ridder stock and options when the deal was completed, plus about 9,500 shares of stock in McClatchy, the company that bought KR. (Those shares have lost half their
value in the meantime.)
No word on Effren’s new pay package at Akeena, but we’ll be watching. On Friday, Akeena gave the outgoing Wallace a “restricted” stock grant for 25,000 that vested the same day.
And in the small-world-after-all department, the departing CFO spent about a half year in the same position for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which has since also been purchased by MediaNews, which now owns the Mercury News.
It’s not often that a company’s shares jump 19 percent the same day it announces the impending departure of its chief financial officer, but that was the case today with Akeena Solar, which was the best performing stock in Silicon Valley Friday.
Subscribe via RSS all feeds