Docu-Drama: $1.25 billion sold, but he’s got more!

Larry Ellison started digging into his option treasure chest over the past few weeks for the first time since he began a selling spree of his Oracle holdings back in September.

Beginning Nov. 26 and pretty much every trading day since, he has exercised and sold 1 million shares a day, totaling 14 million shares through Thursday. Included were the last 5 million shares left in an option priced at $4.18 set to expire next July. The remaining shares have been sold from an option at $6.88 set to expire in June 2009.

Ellison sold these shares at prices ranging from $19.85 to $21.56. His profit on them: $210.5 million.

So far this year Ellison has sold $1.25 billion worth of his company’s stock. He still owns 1.7 billion shares and holds options on millions more, including an option grant for 7 million shares he received in fiscal 2007, in addition to his $1 million salary, $8.4 million bonus and $1.7 million worth of security-related benefits.

Since the July 1998 option was granted, Oracle shares have grown in value at an annual rate of 18 percent compared with 4 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. They closed Friday at $21.20, down 1.4 percent for the week.

That was quick: Little more than a month after signing off on his first quarterly earnings report for Nektar Therapeutics, the San Carlos company he joined as chief financial officer in August, Tim Harkness is gone.

When Harkness was hired, Nektar Chief Executive Howard Robin had this to say: “With his strong understanding of health care and finance, Tim is a critical addition to the leadership team at Nektar.”

Uh, strike that. It seems that Dec. 6 “the decision was made that Timothy Harkness would no longer serve as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Nektar Therapeutics,” according to the company’s 8-K filing Wednesday. Note how the passive sentence structure masks any indication of who made the “decision” or why.

So what does Harkness walk away with after his 15 weeks on the job? A lump sum severance of $385,000, as well as monthly severance payments of $27,500 for up to 12 months, or until he finds a job. That works out to a potential extra $330,000. Nektar will even pay his COBRA bill for continued health coverage as needed for a year.

Nektar also agreed to immediately vest 12,500 shares of an option award he was granted for shares priced at $8.34, and gave him a year in which to exercise them.

Nektar shares fell 17 percent Oct. 18 after drug giant Pfizer said it would stop selling Exubera, the groundbreaking inhaled insulin treatment developed by Nektar, because of lackluster sales.

Nektar lost $19 million in its most recent quarter ended in September on $56.3 million in revenue, according to the only Nektar 10-Q Harkness ever prepared. Nektar has accumulated $1.13 billion in total losses.

Nektar’s board approved a plan in May to reduce its workforce by 25 percent, or 180 employees, at an estimated cost of $8.4 million. For the record, Nektar agreed to pay for their COBRA benefits, too, according to Tim Warner, senior vice president for investor relations and corporate affairs.

Nektar closed Friday at $6.90, down 2.4 percent for the week.