Groupon stock ticks up; founding investor transfers stock

Groupon’s stock ticked up 9 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $4.24 on Tuesday, despite news that Starbucks will be using rival LivingSocial to offer a $10 Starbucks gift card for $5 and Wall Street concerns about declines in construction and manufacturing spending.

Earlier Tuesday, the shares had fallen. Starbucks, whose CEO Howard Schultz resigned from Groupon’s board of directors in April, is offering the LivingSocial deal starting at 5 p.m. Tuesday.

On Friday, founding investor Eric Lefkofsky transferred a portion of his stock to beneficiaries, but he is not selling any of the stock, his spokesman said.

Lefkofsky, the largest Groupon shareholder, late Friday transferred 15.7 million shares to a group of 20 advisers, consultants and early investors, and “gifted” 3 million shares to his family’s charitable foundation, his spokesman said. The shares were moved from a limited liability corporation, 600 West Groupon LLC, that is managed by a firm that Lefkofsky and his wife own.

No directors or executive officers received a distribution, the spokesman said.

“Now is the most practical time to distribute the shares to their rightful owners,” said Lefkofsky spokesman Charles Sipkins of Sard Verbinnen & Co. “It didn’t make sense to do so before the lock-up as the beneficiaries would have been restricted from selling until [the stock lockup] expired. We view this as just part of our natural evolution as a public company.”

Such transfers are usually for tax purposes, tax and compensation experts said Tuesday.

Lefkofsky owns 109.4 million shares, or about 17 percent, of Groupon.