It may well cost $122.5M in total for Larry Ellison (pictured) to settle the so-called derivative lawsuits filed against him in connection with his sale of $900M worth of Oracle stock just before the 2001 price crash, according to the New York Times this morning. $100M would go to charity and $22.5M to the lawyers of the shareholders who filed suit, and one of the most famous inside trading suits of the decade would end – outside of the courtroom.

The Oracle case began with the 2001 sale of some 30 million shares by inside directors Larry Ellison (CEO and then chairman) and Jeffrey Henley (CFO and now chairman) and outsiders Donald Lucas, a venture capitalist, and Michael Boskin, a professor of economics at Stanford and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

The four unloaded all this stock just one to two months before the company announced that revenues and earnings for its fiscal third quarter would not meet expectations. The earnings announcement rocked Wall Street; the stock dropped 21% in a day.

Now, shareholders' attorney Joseph J. Tabacco Jr., of Berman DeValerio Pease Tabacco Burt & Pucillo, is saying that If the agreement is approved, Ellison will pay $100 million, "to be approved by Oracle, in the name of Oracle, over a five-year period,'' to charity, in addition to a $22.5M payment to the lawyers for the shareholders.