week 13: largest shareholder

Another Monday, another P&A that would never end.

Who do I work for? Well, the obvious answer aside, what individual owns a sizeable chunk of the company? It turns out, the single largest shareholder is a man named Didiar Primet. (Name deliberately misspelled. Reason fairly obvious.) Based on the shareholder report I received, which you can download here you see that he actually holds about 10 million more shares than listed on the Yahoo! site. That information can be found on page 6 of the .pdf proxy statement (which is page 4 of the report). He's also a board member of the company.

As a total aside, if you're willing to download the 2005 Annual Report (from the same page that the proxy statement can be obtained from) you can see a full size image of some pretty cool looking seismic equipment. That front cover image that you see thumbnailed on the web page continues on the rear of the report which is the last page of the .pdf.

Anyway, our largest shareholder holds a place on the Forbes billionaires list. He came in at 317th with a net worth of about $2.4 billion. The little blurb about him isn't very informative to me, though it does confirm what I suspected about the source of his shares. While it doesn't state it there, he is the grandson of one of the original founding brothers. What I did find informative were the renovation plans for the Luttrellstown Castle. Perhaps there will be a little company soiree when the spa and bar are done. Perhaps I won't be invited either.

Additionally, DP (that's my nickname for him, we're tight like that) also appears to be worth kidnapping. So, I guess if I get desperate I can always hire some thugs to kidnap the man who holds about 2.5% of all outstanding shares.

But wait, there's even more that the internet has to offer. I'm not sure what to call this, but this bizarre anti-right-wing conspiracy rant makes several interesting claims about DP as well as Schlumberger in general. Apparently, between Schlumberger and Enron, "the older and filthier of the two is Schlumberger, the intelligence apparatus masquerading as an oil services company". And according to this well vetted piece of journalism, members of the Schlumberger family were involved in putting Castro in power, attempting to remove him, and running the corporate front that was behind the JFK assassination. As for DP, the piece claims that he has "rather secretive operations in the Carolinas and Virginia, overlapping the intelligence and eugenics operations" of blah blah blah. Eugenics? This is awesomely absurd. Frankly, I didn't have to fortitude to read the entire piece but what I read was most entertaining. (Note 2 at the bottom is also a good laugher.)

Isn't it great what a Google search can turn up? Blast my common sounding name. It's all I have to define myself with. (It is a bit of a downer to see the first result for my name has to do with someone's memorial service. Or at least that's the result I got.)