Media mogul (显要人物) Ted Turner yesterday sold more than half of his AOL Time Warner Inc. holdings for about $780 million, a move that reflects his efforts to slash his financial stake in the media giant.
After the close of regular trading yesterday, Turner sold a block of 60 million shares to Goldman Sachs & Co. for $13.07 per share, or 31 cents below the stock’s closing price yesterday. Goldman was said by Wall Street sources to be offering the stock to major investors for $13.15.
An outspoken critic of the corporation, Turner remains AOL Time Warner’s largest individual shareholder, with 45 million shares, and a member of its board of directors. A spokeswoman for Turner referred questions to AOL Time Warner.
At his peak Turner owned about 130 million shares, but he lost billions of dollars in wealth and grew bitter after the stock plunged following the merger of America Online and Time Warner in January 2001.
Turner, who initially supported the merger, later expressed outrage over revelations that America Online had manipulated its financial results. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating AOL, and the corporation has acknowledged discovering tens of millions of dollars of overstated revenue.
Turner resigned as vice chairman earlier this year and has been spending less of his time on AOL Time Warner matters. He stepped down after achieving his goal of pressuring the founder of America Online—Steve Case-to resign as the corporation’s chairman. Case said he was giving up the post to avoid a bruising public battle for reelection at next week’s annual meeting.
In the effort to oust Case, Turner teamed up with Gordon Crawford, the senior media portfolio manager at Capital Research & Management, the largest institutional shareholder in AOL Time Warner. Capital -Research has indicated it will vote against Case’s election to remain on the board of directors next week--a position that ysts said should not affect the outcome. Turner, meanwhile, has said he will support the management slate (候选人) that includes Case and will make Richard D. Parsons the company’s chairman and chief executive.
Turner, a visionary who started Cable News Network, is in the midst of rolling out a new chain of restaurants, Ted’s Montana Grill, featuring bison burgers. He recently moved his residence from Georgia to Florida for estate-planning purposes and is spending time and money on his independent film company, which lost millions of dollars on a lengthy movie about the Civil War.
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