America's 5th-richest individual, Larry Ellison, will be over $122M poorer as the result of a hearing held yesterday in Redwood City, CA, in which Judge John Schwartz approved a highly unusual way for him to finally 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. Ellison has to pay $100M to charity.

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.

Ellison denies all allegations of insider trading, but by donating $100 million, at the rate of $20M a year for the next 5 years, in Oracle's name to charities approved by the company, he can at last say that it is legally dead and buried because Oracle shareholders have agreed to drop their claims in California if he'll go through with it.