Bear Stearns CEO sells stock

James Cayne sells 172,621 shares of the investment bank in what a spokesperson calls a routine sell. He still owns 5.6 million shares.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Bear Stearns Chief Executive James E. Cayne sold $15.4 million of the investment bank's stock this month, at the end of a year in which he found himself at the forefront of a global credit crisis.
Cayne, who is also Bear Stearns' chairman, exercised and sold 172,621 shares of stock vested under a capital accumulation plan last Friday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday.
He fetched $89.01 per share, according to the filing. At the beginning of the year the stock traded at more than $160.
Cayne still owns 5.6 million shares, or about 5 percent of the company.
Every year, Bear Stearns grants executives "CAP units" entitled to a share of the company's annual profit and dividends. After five years, the CAP units become stock. The stock Cayne sold this month was acquired through CAP units granted in 2002.
A spokeswoman for Bear Stearns said executives for tax reasons typically sell stock acquired through CAP units. She pointed out Cayne and most other executives sell stock vested through their CAP units every year.
"The sale of stock by the members of the executive committee is in line with what each of them has done in the past," the spokeswoman said.
Bear Stearns has been at the heart of this year's liquidity crisis, which has pushed scores of mortgage lenders out of business, bled more than $100 billion from Wall Street's books, and coaxed the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by a full percentage point.
Some people point to the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds established to bet on risky mortgage debt as the trigger for the subprime crisis.
Merrill raises $6.2 billion in slew of deals
Bear Stearns executives triggered a 2.6 percent one-day sell-off in the stock market this summer when they compared the lack of liquidity plaguing financial markets to the bond market crisis of the late 1990s, the bursting of the tech bubble, and the stock market crash of 1987.
Cayne later came under fire after the Wall Street Journal reported that as the two hedge funds were going bankrupt, he was playing golf and bridge without access to e-mail or a telephone.
Bear Stearns' profit plummeted 89 percent in fiscal 2007 as the bank wrote billions of dollars of bad debt off its books. The company's stock has lost almost 47 percent of its value this year and on Friday registered its cheapest trade in three years.
Still, Cayne has managed to hold on to his job even as colleagues like Citigroup's (C, Fortune 500) Charles Prince and Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Stan O'Neal have been ousted from their offices.
Last year, the company granted Cayne a compensation package worth $38.1 million. Bear has already said Cayne will not take a bonus this year.
British investor Joseph Lewis has poured money into a growing stake in Bear Stearns (BS), having acquired 11.1 million shares for a 9.6 percent stake to become the bank's biggest shareholder.
Earlier this week, Lewis disclosed he bought nearly 2 million shares, most of them at more than the stock is worth because he had granted or sold options to another investor.