Sudha Murty sells Rs 430cr Infy shares

Sudha N Murty, wife of Infosys Technologies chairman and chief mentor, N R Narayana Murthy, on Thursday sold 20 lakh Infosys shares worth Rs 430 crore. The money will be used as corpus for the venture capital fund ‘Catamaran Investment', that is being set up in Bangalore by the couple to promote entrepreneurship among young Indians with brilliant ideas.Incidentally, Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan on Thursday bought four lakh Infosys shares from the open market for a total consideration of Rs 86.6 crore. Narayana Murthy, late last month, had sold 8 lakh Infosys shares worth Rs 170-crore to fund Catamaran. This means that the corpus of Catamaran will now be Rs 600 crore or about $130 million. Murthy, who will step down from Infosys in 2011, when he turns 65, is preparing for an active-post-Infosys career if his VC move is any indication. Infosys on Thursday said that Murthy had informed the company that the couple do not have plans "for raising further capital for the fund, at present." Sudha Murty, who is the chairperson of the Infosys Foundation, is one of the largest individual shareholders of Infosys and the biggest from among the Murthy family. Before Thursday's sale she held 93 lakh shares in the company her husband co-founded almost three decades ago. Her stake as on October 10 stood at 1.62%. Total promoter holding in the company before the sale was 16.48%. Infosys scrip closed at Rs 2,223, down by 0.74% over Wednesday's close.