SAP FOUNDERS TERMINATE SHARE-POOLING PACT

SAP FOUNDERS TERMINATE SHARE-POOLING PACT    SAP, one of Europe’s largest providers of logistics and supply chain management software solutions, announced on Tuesday that its founding shareholders had ended a share-pooling agreement that served as a protection against a hostile corporate takeover.
   Hasso Plattner, co-chief executive, Dietmar Hopp, and Klaus Tschira, three of the four former IBM employees who founded SAP almost 30 years ago, had pooled part of their SAP stocks in a joint 26.7 percent holding group.
   The arrangement began in 1989, after the fourth SAP founder, Hans-Werner Hector, began selling stock against his colleagues’ wishes.
   The pooling agreement mattered less after SAP decided, in February, 2001, to convert its non-voting shares into ordinary shares, reducing the voting rights of the founders from 63 to 39 percent. As of Tuesday, Plattner, Hopp and Tschira held 30.17 percent of the votes.
   “This is just another part of a process to clean up our capital structure and make it more readily understandable to investors,” SAP said in a statement. “And, given our size, we would no longer be a takeover target.”