Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday that vice chairman Marius Nacht filed a request for the sale of three million shares in the company at Friday's opening price of $22.49. The sale will total $67.5 million (about NIS 274 million).
Check Point's share rose 0.8% on Friday to $22.67, giving a market cap of $4.8 billion. The share rose 4.4% over the past year.
In the past three years, Nacht's sales of Check Point shares have been routine. In 2006-08, he sold blocks of shares, amounting to a few million dollars each, every few months. Only three of the requests for sale, including the current one, amounted to tens of millions of dollars.
In the past 26 months, Nacht has sold Check Point shares for a total of $218.3 million, which makes him one of the biggest private sellers of shares of Nasdaq-listed Israeli companies.
According to Check Point's financial report for 2007, Nacht owned 9.4% of the company at the end of 2007. His fortune is therefore worth a gross NIS 2.3 billion, of which one third is in cash. As a result of subsequent sales, an examination by "Globes" indicates that he now owns 7.2% of the company. Check Point chairman and CEO Gil Shwed owns 15.8%, including one million options received in 2008. The largest institutional investor in the company is Franklin Resources Inc. (NYSE: BEN), with a stake of 16.3%.
Over the years, Shwed and Nacht have received options on Check Point shares, exercisable at market prices. They excused their massive sales of shares by the need to finance the additional exercise of options whose maturity was pending. Nacht's current request to sell may therefore involve shares he originally received as options, and which he exercised. His capital from the sale will therefore be considerably less than the gross sale.
On the basis of Check Point's last annual statement, the minimum strike price of Nacht's options is $13 per share, and if current request to sell includes at least some options with a strike price of $13, his capital gain per option will be around $10.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on February 1, 2009
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2009