LARRY PAGE, the president of Google, made more than $50 million (£27 million) in the past week selling hundreds of thousands of shares in the internet search engine he co-founded with college friend Sergey Brin.

Mr Page has dumped 255,000 shares of the company since January 18 in 94 separate transactions.

He managed to secure top prices for the shares, which sold between $197 and $205 each for a total profit of $51,562,418.54. The shares were given to Mr Page as part of an executive compensation scheme.

Mr Page did well to sell the shares when he did. The price has since plunged from about $205 to sit at $183.013 on Wall Street yesterday afternoon. If he had sold at yesterday’s prices he would have made just $46 million — over $5 million less than his actual profits.

Google declined to comment on the reason for Mr Page’s sell-off. Only five days before the share sale began the company settled charges brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it failed to register more than $80 million of employee stock options before its flotation.

The company settled without admitting or denying any of the charges. The SEC at the same time dropped an investigation into Mr Page and Mr Brin’s conduct in the run-up to last year’s flotation.

The pair gave an interview to Playboy magazine, thought to have breached SEC rules. Insiders speculated that Mr Page waited until the SEC investigations were out of the way before selling for personal financial reasons. Google listed at $85 a share last August.

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