Lycos Europe shareholders voted to liquidate the business at an extraordinary general meeting at a hotel in Amsterdam this morning. They also nodded through management’s strategy to sell its domain registration business, shopping portal and Danish website as going concerns. Shareholders will get €50 million returned to them on December 19 - not a bad Christmas present, but the price per share of €0.1605 is vastly less than its opening high of about €24 in 2000.

The majority of the company was owned by Telefonica’s Terra internet arm (32 percent), Bertelsmann (20 percent) and CEO Christoph Monn (12 percent), heir to Bertelsmann’s throne

Lycos Europe, which had been losing money and users for years, finally concluded last month that no-one was going to buy it, after starting a strategic review in April. During the sale process, Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) took Lycos Europe to court in its native Netherlands, complaining the CEO had not explored all the options for the sell-off. About 500 of 700 staff are now losing their jobs. Lycos is based in Germany and Holland and has a UK ad sales team, which it’s thought also sells for sites including IMDB and About.com, but the Lycos UK content operations are outsourced to a third-party here. Release.

More at our Lycos Europe channel

Lycos Europe has always been a separate company to America’s Lycos Inc, but both sites have suffered since they were the web’s most-visited back in the portal hey-days of 1999. The US company has changed hands twice since then and the European venture has failed to capitalise on the online ads boom - though it still trumpets recent product releases like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Answers clone Lycos iQ, it had been losing money at a particularly chronic rate in the last two years. Emblematic of the state of affairs, Lycos Europe last year paid Lycos Inc $5.2 million to renew its license to use the brand name, while entering the US itself under a completely different name, Jubii.

The company started a strategic review in April but, though Mohn suggested AOL (NYSE: TWX) and German ad net Tomorrow Focus were keen to bid around €200 million, it’s clear the sale process was flailing.

One option may have been to reunite the disparate Lycos regions - we received word anonymously in August that one suitor was teaming with Lycos Inc’s Korean owner for a bid, but the banks were said to have walked away, citing the company’s poor performance and unrealistic target of turning a profit by 2011. The last prices we heard being talked about were €100 to €150 million.

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