Best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark buys seat on CBOE

Author Mary Higgins Clark, who has sold more than 80 million copies of her suspense novels in the U.S., has purchased a seat on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, Bloomberg News reported. The CBOE this month filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell stock for the first time after it completes a demutualization process that will convert the member-owned exchange into a stock-based company. Members of the exchange, who own the company by virtue of their seat ownership, will vote in the first half of this year on whether to proceed with the initial public offering. The 930 seat-holders are slated to get 60,000 shares each in the demutualization. Ms. Clark, who is married to former Merrill Lynch Futures Inc. CEO John Conheeney, purchased the seat for $2.95 million on March 11, according to Bloomberg, which attributed the information to two unnamed sources familiar with the transaction. The CBOE, which tracks seat sales on its Web site, has a record of a seat being sold for $2.95 million on that date, which is the same day the exchange filed for the IPO. The most recent seat sale prior to that transaction was one for $2.7 million on March 9. Ms. Clark, the author of 24 suspense novels, couldn't immediately be reached. Her publicist at publisher Simon & Schuster didn't return a call seeking comment. [This story first appeared in Crain's Chicago Business, a sister publication of InvestmentNews.]