TD Ameritrade to buy back stake from founder family

NEW YORK (Reuters) - TD Ameritrade Holding Corp (AMTD.O) will buy back 34 million shares from the family of founder Joe Ricketts, which will use the proceeds to buy the Chicago Cubs pro baseball team, the brokerage said on Wednesday.

The second-largest U.S. discount broker -- which last month agreed to buy online options broker thinkorswim Group Inc (SWIM.O) -- said it would pay $11.85 per share, or a total of $403 million.

The Ricketts family is TD Ameritrade's second-largest shareholder.

The buyback drops the proportion of shares controlled by the Ricketts family to about 17 percent from 22 percent. Earlier this month, Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD.TO) boosted its stake in the broker to nearly 45 percent.

Last month, Tribune Co, which owns the Cubs, named Joe Ricketts' son Tom as the winning bidder for the Cubs, the team's Wrigley Field venue, and a 25 percent stake in a regional sports cable TV network. His bid was $900 million.

Tom Ricketts now must finalize a purchase agreement and arrange financing.

Tribune, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times newspapers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December due to its heavy debt load and the weak U.S. publishing sector.

The company put the Cubs on the auction block in April 2007, when it agreed to an $8.2 billion buyout led by real estate magnate Sam Zell.

Separately, at a shareholders' meeting Wednesday, TD Ameritrade Chief Executive Fred Tomczyk said the company had laid off 160 workers in the past two weeks across various geographic regions and job levels as part of its previously announced plan to reduce costs by $60 million.

He added he did not foresee additional job cuts in the immediate future.

(Reporting by Juan Lagorio, additional reporting by Jonathan Spicer and Phil Wahba; editing by John Wallace, Richard Chang)