SiliconBeat

The ones at Intuit, the Mountain View financial software company, are coming at Internet speed. Their fiscal year ended today, but the board has already voted to award bonuses based on performances, which the rest of us won’t know about until earnings are reported next month.

But apparently, they were pretty darn good. On Monday, the company disclosed in an 8-K that it will pay out $101 million in employee bonuses. A year ago, the company had about 7,500 employees, which works out to about $13,500 per working stiff. Though we presume some workers were more equal than others.

That figure doesn’t include executive bonuses:

Stephen Bennett, president and CEO: $3.25 milion.

William Campbell, chairman: $600,000.

Scott Cook, chairman of the executive committee: $400,000.

Brad Henske, former vice president, consumer tax group: $720,000.

Richard William Ihrie, senior vice president, small business product development: $450,000.

Kiran M. Patel, senior vice president, consumer tax group: $683,000.

Brad Smith, senior vice president, small business division: $765,000.

CV Therapeutics, the biopharmaceutical company based in Palo Alto, disclosed in an 8-K filed on Monday that it had hired an investment banker to advise “the company on a range of strategic opportunities.”

The magic man in this case is Frederick Frank, vice chairman of Lehman Brothers. According to a press release and the filing, “Mr. Frank has advised a range of notable biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and has been involved in hundreds of transactions in the health care field over the past 48 years.”

CV’s primary product is Ranexa, which is used to treat chronic angina. The company potentially has a second compound that may be approved for use in 2008.

In a statement, Frank was quoted as saying: ”I am looking forward to helping the company build value for these assets.”

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that CV could put itself up for sale. But these things have a way of gathering momentum on their own.

And, of course, the company lost $57.6 million in the quarter ending in June on $25.4 million in revenue, which isn’t the healthiest of ratios. But the stock, which was trading at $11.25 on Monday afternoon, is only down slightly over the past year.

The board at Trident Microsystems of Santa Clara is so pleased with the work of president Jun-Herng Chang and chief financial officer John Edmunds over the past year that they awarded them special bonuses beyond the annual executive bonus plan.

On July 24, the semiconductor compaany’s board voted to give Chang a $150,000 bonus and Edmunds a $100,000.

So what did they do to earn this bonus bonus? Let’s see, stock is down 10.2 percent over the past year. Nope, that can’t be it.

Ah, here we go. According to an 8-K filed on Monday:

“These special bonuses are payable, in the case of the President, for his demonstrated leadership during the past fiscal year, and in fulfilling many of the duties previously performed by the Company’s former chief executive officer, and in the case of the Chief Financial Officer, in recognition of the extraordinary amount of additional work required in connection with the Special Committee investigation into the Company’s historical stock option practices, and the preparation of the Company’s restatement of its prior period financial statements.”

In other words, it’s hard work cleaning up those backdating options problems, what with all those numbers and calendars and restatements and things. But it seems these guys are on the job.

Meanwhile, Trident is still facing delisting threats from Nasdaq for failing to file its earnings reports and holding a shareholder meeting. No, word on when any of those things will happen.

Last November, VeriSign acquired a wireless company named inCode, whose chief executive was John Donovan. Since then, Donovan has become VeriSign’s executive vice president of worldwide sales and services.

How badly did VeriSign want Donovan to stick around? According a proxy filed on Friday, VeriSign paid him $5 million under a “management retention plan” for in Code. He got another $1,366,827 for relocation expenses.

Earlier this week, we posted about an interesting dispute at Ampex, where a major shareholder, ValueVest of San Francisco, made what essentially seems to be hostile takeover bid for the company’s patent portfolio. In corporate lingo, the offer was “unsolicited.”

Now comes Ampex, filing in response on Friday, to say that they’re pretty bummed out that ValueVest made its offer public. In e-mail from sent on Thursday from Ampex’s chief executive to ValuVest’s partners, he says he’s writing:

to express my dismay at your determination that it was necessary to publish this proposal … two days later. While you characterize your proposal as a term sheet, it is not based upon any general understanding between the parties and is in fact unacceptable to Ampex in its current form.

Beyond that, Ampex said it’s still waiting to get a report from a group hired to evaluate its portfolio of 420 patents to see if there are any that could be used to possibly instigate litigation against other companies who may be violating them. In a nutshell, the company doesn’t like ValueVest’s offer to pay $7 million for the patents, create a new company around them, and invest another $7 million in that company:

Ampex never anticipated that we would be asked to merely turn over our intellectual property assets to a company in which we had no ownership interest in return for a possible revenue stream, without any knowledge or understanding of the plans or prospects for producing such revenue.

That same day, a ValueVest investment manager replied in another e-mail:

As Ampex’s largest stockholder, we continue to believe that it is imperative that Ampex increase the commercial utilization of its intellectual property in order to preserve and maximize shareholder value for all Ampex stockholders. We continue to be prepared and available to assist Ampex in achieving this important goal.

To be continued…

Packeteer of Cupertino has also drawn the attention of the IRS. In a 10-Q filed Friday, the company disclosed in a footnote that that the IRS told the company in late June that it owes $122 million, plus penalties of $49 million, for the years 2003 and 2004.

Of course, Packeteer disagrees and says it will file a “timely protest.” Expect a resolution before the end of the decade. Maybe.

Here’s the good news at Coherent of Santa Clara in an 8-K filed on Thursday. A Special Committe has been studying options granted over the past decade and concluded:

that there was no intentional wrongdoing by the Company’s current directors, its Chief Executive Officer, John Ambroseo, or its Chief Financial Officer, Helene Simonet.

Here’s the bad news. The Special Committe and management have:

determined that incorrect measurement dates for a significant number of stock option awards during the Relevant Period were used.

No word yet on how many, how much, or how big the restatements will be.

New chief executive Mark J. Barrenechea is going to have his work cut out for him at Rackable Systems. According to an 8-K filed on Wednesday. The Fremont maker of servers for data centers disclosed its second quarter financial results, which included $40 million loss on $82 million in revenue. That loss included a $20 million write down on inventory due to a “technology shift.”

Technology shift? The company has only been public for two years. We know things change fast ’round these parts, but still…

That tax man cometh to National Semiconductor.

In a 10-K filed on Thursday, the Sunnyvale company noted that the IRS has been auditing its tax returns for the fiscal years running from 1997 to 2000. The IRS has decided National owes another $19.1 million (not including interest). National begs to differ and is appealing through the IRS administrative process.

Even if it loses, the company says it won’t have a material affect.

Shantanu Narayen might be number two at Adobe Systems of San Jose, but for the week of July 13 he was the number one seller of stock among Silicon Valley insiders.

Narayen, president and chief operating officer, has been at Adobe since 1998. And the company credits him with spearheading – along with chief executive Bruce Chizen – the $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia in 2005.

On July 19, Narayen paid $6.5 million to exercise 250,000 shares at prices ranging from $21.78 to $32.16 per share. He sold 241,000 shares of that stock on the same day for $42.02 per share, giving him a net gain of $3.6 million on that day – keeping in mind he held on to 9,000 shares.

Since becoming an insider, Narayen has sold $123.5 million worth of Adobe stock.

Selling at Adobe this quarter has been moderate. According to Thomson Financial, since the beginning of June, Adobe insiders have sold $18.0 million worth of stock. The five-year average
for this quarter is $20.2 million.

Adobe’s stock is up 1.5 percent for the year as of Wednesday.