As part of a agreed stock trading plan Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google Inc could sell as many as 2.4 million shares of the company’s class A common stock worth nearly $1.5 billion. In a filing with the U.S. regulatory authority the California-based company said Schmidt adopted the Rule 10b5-1 plan last November and could begin selling shares this month.Schmidt is currently serving as an executive chairman at Google Inc. after resigning from the CEO post last april after serving for 10 years as Google’s CEO. If all the shares are sold under the plan his voting power on the company’s stock would reduce to about 7.3 percent.
As of December 31, he held 9.1 million shares of Google’s Class A and Class B common stock – wielding about 9.7 percent voting power. If all 2.4 million shares of stock are sold, that will reduce Schmidt’s class A and B shares to 6.7 million and reduce stake in the company from 2.8 percent to 2.1 percent.
Schmidt had turned the job of CEO over to the one of the co-founders Larry Page after his ten year stint. Together Page, Schmidt and the other co-founder Sergey Bin hold the majority of the shareholder voting power at Google. Previuosly in 2010 Page and Sergey Bin filed plans to sell 5 million Google shares each and those sales would be completed in 2010. They will still have control of the company even after their reduced stakes.
