Ex-BBC chief Davies sells £4m shares

FORMER BBC chairman Gavyn Davies sold shares worth £4m in his old employer, investment bank Goldman Sachs, five days before he resigned from the corporation in the wake of the Hutton report.

The sale, which was among the biggest tranches of Goldman shares that Davies has sold, follows share sales of nearly £10m disclosed last year.

The latest transaction, detailed in a filing last week with the US Securities & Exchange Commission, represents a fraction of the holding handed to Davies, who was chief international economist and senior partner of Goldman Sachs when the firm went public in 1999.

The number of shares awarded to Davies was never disclosed, but estimates at the time indicated that his stake could have been worth as much as £100m.

Davies, 53, has been a consistent seller of Goldman's shares since the end of a lock-up period that prevented insiders from selling. SEC documents indicate that share sales by Davies in the past three years approach £40m.

Davies's wife, Sue Nye, is Chancellor Gordon Brown's political secretary and he has sometimes been described as an 'unofficial adviser' to Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Davies and Nye were credited with organising lavish meals for City bosses to help win support for Labour during the run-up to the 1997 General Election.

His annual salary at Goldman, which he relinquished in late 2001 when he took over chairmanship of the BBC, was said to be £2m - more than 20 times what he was paid at the corporation.