Arne Alexander Wilhelmsen has offloaded $78.5m in shares of Royal Caribbean Group, which was co-founded by his late father.
The company board member sold 278,720 common shares on Monday at $94.56 each and another 442,894 shares on Tuesday at $95.22 each, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) document.
The two sales tranches leave Wilhelmsen with 14,509 directly owned and 23m indirectly held shares.
The indirectly owned shares include 35.3m shares held by family holding company Awilhelmsen and 10.1m shares owned by Aweco Invest, over which Wilhelmsen also presides as chairman.
The move came after Royal Caribbean shareholders voted on 2 June to re-elect Wilhelmsen, son of late company co-founder Arne Wilhelmsen, to its board of directors.
He received almost 170m shareholder votes on 2 June in favour of staying on the 12-member board, according to a SEC filing.
Arne Alexander Wilhelmsen has been a board member since 2003 and is chairman of Awilhelmsen, the family owned by his father's surviving family.
Arne Wilhelmsen, a Norwegian billionaire who helped establish Royal Caribbean Cruise Line in 1968, handed over the reins of Awilhelmsen to his son in 2005. He died at 90 in April last year.
Royal Caribbean Group chief executive Richard Fain then remembered the late Arne Wilhelmsen, who was also president of family shipping business Anders Wilhelmsen & Co, as a forward-looking innovator.
“At a time when the rest of the world thought cruising was a niche use for old transatlantic liners, Arne was already seeing glimmers of the growth that was possible,” Fain said.
This story was amended to accurately report Arne Alexander Wilhelmsen's re-election to Royal Caribbean's board of directors. We regret the error.
