Business Insider published a piece tonight that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are going to be selling $4.4billion worth of their holdings in Google. This was supposedly in place as part of a liquidation plan that expired in January. In 2014 Google did participate with the overall upswing to the market as the shares were lower by $32.24 or 5.8%.
After the stock sales they will still control 52% of the voting power.
Page and Brin can retain control on Google just because of a special dual-class share structure.
IMHO dual-class share structures, especially those based on different (multiple) voting rights (as in Google case) should not be allowed because they represent a strong distortion to a correct functioning of the market, since they, ceteris paribus, give more rights to some shareholders at the expense of others.
It’s basically a way to keep control on a company without investing how should it be necessary to own the majority of its capital, and it’s typical of a capitalism of the castes/closed circles …