SiliconBeat

Vahid Manian, a senior vice president of Broadcom and the head of its manufacturing operations, had his employment with the company “terminated” today, according to a terse regulatory filing. The company said it has begun a search to find his successor. The termination came after “questions surfaced about the validity of academic degrees listed in his company biography,” according to a Bloomberg News report.

Bloomberg reported that Manian didn’t earn degrees from the University of California at Irvine that are cited on the company’s Web site, according to the schools registrar. Broadcom’s Web site said Manian had bachelors and masters of business administration degrees from the University of California at Irvine, according to the Bloomberg report. The executive attended the school between September 1979 and August 1983 but wasn’t awarded any degrees,  according to the report citing Mark Fonseca, who is responsible for privacy issues in the school’s registrar’s office.

Manian joined Broadcom in 1996 as director of operations and became vice president of operations the following year. He was elevated to his most recent position in 2005.

Manian was also recently elected vice chairman of Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us have shared certain economic hardships recently — high gas prices, falling home values, diminished 401(k) balances. A subset of us have been dealing with foreclosures and job losses, problems that many of us can easily empathize with. Here’s one that may take a bit more of an imaginative leap: the margin call.

This week Howard Lester, the chief executive of Williams-Sonoma (ticker:WSM), the San Francisco-based retailer of deluxe goodies for our kitchens, living rooms, bath rooms and nurseries, was forced to sell Read the rest of this entry »

When Ciriaco “Eric” Rivor of Millbrae learned in mid-2007 that his company, the Corte Medera-based home furnishing retailer Restoration Hardware, was about to be acquired by a private equity firm at a “substantial premium”, the former finance vice president passed the confidential, non-public information to friends Emmanuel Axiaq of San Carlos, Calif., and Steven Lusardi of San Jose, according to allegations leveled by the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday. Rivor also told Emmanuel Axiaq to pass the information to his father, Francis Axiaq of Millbrae, according to the SEC complaint.

That last bit of advice was probably especially unwise, in retrospect. Read the rest of this entry »

Ariba President Kevin Costello filed his third stock sales plan in a year Tuesday, according to a filing Thursday with the SEC.

The plan was written to comply with Rule 10b5-1 that allows executives to Read the rest of this entry »

Why is it so difficult for Microsoft to compete with Google? Steve Ballmer tried to explain at the software giant’s annual analyst day up in Redmond on Thursday. (Thanks to our colleague Elise Ackerman, who covers Google and Yahoo for the Mercury News, for providing this to Docu-Drama.) Read the rest of this entry »

Feel the need to “Talk to Chuck” about his recent selling of more than $70 million in company stock?

The Charles Schwab Corporation thought you might, which could explain why it put out a press release Friday afternoon detailing why its big guy, Chuck, sold shares of company stock earlier that day. It seems the shares were acquired through the exercise of an option that was set to expire next month.

“Unexercised options are canceled upon expiration and therefore lose all value,” the release patiently explained to the great unwashed among us.

The option, granted in May 1998, was originally good for 700,000 shares priced at $34.69, and were part of “Mr. Schwab’s” (guess he’s not on a first nickname basis with the folks in PR) “long-term incentive compensation.” Three stock splits later the grant grew to 3.3 million shares priced at $7.35 per share.

Being forced to exercise them is one thing, but we’re assuming no one held a gun to his head to sell them all. The press release explains that “the exercised options were
immediately sold as part of Mr. Schwab’s long-standing practice of periodically selling shares for personal financial management purposes.” Were they sold through a Schwab broker, we wonder? The press release doesn’t say.

Just in case you’re feeling, well, envious the press release also explained that Chuck — we commoners are encouraged to call him Chuck — paid some $22 million of the $48 million profit he made to the tax man.

Finally, don’t be thinking this is a signal of any bearishness on Chuck’s part about his company’s stock: they shares sold were “less than 1.6 percent” of his holdings in the company. He still controls about 208 million more.

The name Bruce Sherman may not mean much to the average person. But for those of us in newspapers, he’s been one of the most important names in the news game in recent years. Sherman, who runs Private Capital Management, a Florida-based investment firm, took huge stakes in most major newspaper companies early in this decade. One could say that nobody believed in the future of newspapersmore than Sherman, who staked billions of dollars on it.

But in November 2005, Sherman soured on newspapers, and launched an assault on Knight Ridder, the San Jose newspaper chain that used to own the Mercury News among others. That fight led to the eventual sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy (ticker:MNI) of Sacramento. McClatchy, in turn, sold the Mercury News to privately-held MediaNews of Denver, our current owner.

The fallout from Sherman’s march continues to plague newspapers. But meanwhile, Sherman has decided to bail. Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine, reported this week that PCM and Sherman have sold almost all their newspaper stock. Considering that PCM held more than 37 percent of McClatchy’s stock at one point, that’s a lot of stock sales. McClatchy’s stock has fallen from $69.13 three years ago, to $9.77 in mid-day trading on Friday. Fitch just downgraded its debt again this week.

E&P also notes that PCM sold its rather large positions in other newspaper companies:

“In that same period, PCM owned a 15.07% stake in the Times Co., an 18.96% stake in Lee, and a 22.31% stake in Belo. It also had substantial positions in Gannett and a small amount of Tribune Co. stock.”

It’s unclear how big his losses were. But lest you feel too bad for Mr. Sherman, he also filed an amended 13-G on Thursday disclosing his 8.7 percent stake in BEA Systems (ticker:BEAS). Sherman had previously held as much as 10.2 percent of the stock when he first disclosed the holding back in May 2005.

BEA, of course, is being bought by Oracle for $8.5 billion, or $19.38 per share in cash. That means the 34.5 million shares Sherman owns would fetch $669.5 million. It’s unclear what kind of profit that means for Sherman, but he bought a big chunk of the stock when it was trading well under $10 per share.

So as consolation prizes go, BEA will do just fine. 

In the roughly five months before Meg Whitman announced Wednesday she would step down as chief executive of eBay, she made more than $100 million exercising options for the first time since the company went public, bringing her take from eBay stock to more than a half billion dollars.

EBay’s shares fell the next day, dropping $1.76, or 6.1 percent, to $27.18 before closing
Friday at a 52-week low of $26.83.

In addition to the Whitman announcement, eBay also released results Wednesday for its
fourth quarter, which beat Wall Street expectations, but warned of slower-than-expected growth.

Whitman’s recent stock sales were made under a trading plan she set up last February to sell up to 6.4 million shares between June 2007 and February 2008. The plan was formed under SEC rule 10b5-1, which permits insiders to adopt plans for selling or purchasing specific amounts of stocks over a certain time, so long as the individual is not in possession of “material nonpublic information” when the plan is adopted.

Whitman’s announcement Wednesday raises a question: when did she know she was going to quit, and could her decision be considered “”material nonpublic information”?

We asked eBay but received no reply after two days.

During a conference call Wednesday, Whitman told analysts, “I’ve repeatedly said that 10 years was about the right amount of time for any CEO to stay at the helm of a company. Now that I’ve reached that milestone, I’ve decided that it’s time for eBay to have new leadership, a new perspective and a new vision.”

When we asked about the sales back in September, a spokesperson for eBay assured us that Whitman remained committed to the company and that her sales were simply a part of her “personal asset management.”

An option grant for 2.4 million shares given to Whitman when she was hired cost her
$480,000 to exercise before the company went public. She used $60,000 of her own money and borrowed the rest from eBay. Those shares, when sold over the years, brought her $412 million, according to Thomson Financial.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that Whitman appears to be investigating a career in politics, citing a source “close to her” who said she had been ‘talking with Republicans around the state” about running for governor of California in 2010, and “had become ‘fascinated’ by politics in her work as a fundraiser for GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and a former colleague of Whitman at the consulting firm Bain & Co.”

That’s the same firm where she found her eventual successor, John Donahoe.

Like Romney is doing, Whitman could easily finance her own campaign, as she ranked No. 361 on Forbes’ 2007 list of the richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion.

Robert Kluge set a record last month when he sold more than $10 million worth of shares in Varian Medical where he is vice president in charge of x-ray products. It was the biggest insider sale of company stock ever, according to records from Thomson Financial.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.