By Greg Ruel, Research Associate On Tuesday, the SEC announced former chairman and CEO of CSK Auto Corporation, Maynard L. Jenkins, would be returning almost $3 million in bonus and equity compensation. The agency was enacting Sarbanes-Oxley for the second time this year to clawback monies earned during a period of accounting fraud. The original [...]
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SEC Claws Back CEO Compensation in Settlement of Accounting Fraud Case
November 17, 2011 in CEO Pay, Executive Pay
Keeping up with the Nabors
November 10, 2011 in Executive Pay
By Paul Hodgson – CCO and Senior Research Associate Somewhat belatedly, Nabors has disclosed that the SEC is investigating the company on issues related to perks and benefits. Here’s the paragraph from the 10-Q: On September 21, 2011, we received an informal inquiry from the SEC related to perquisites and personal benefits received by the officers [...]
OWS Protesters Target Big Bank CEOs, Security Perks Put to Use
November 4, 2011 in CEO Pay, Executive Pay, Executive Pay: Banks, Financial Crisis
By Greg Ruel, Research Associate JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon received $17k in security costs in 2010. The security figure represented a diminutive portion of his nearly $600k in perks for the year, though he could be looking to beef up security soon after being approached by Occupy Seattle protesters Wednesday afternoon. According [...]
Consecutive Say on Pay Fail Votes at Hemispherx Biopharma
October 25, 2011 in CEO Pay, Executive Pay, Executive Pay: Say on Pay
By Greg Ruel- Research Associate Pharmaceutical company Hemispherx Biopharma included an advisory vote on executive compensation with proxy materials for a second straight year. The proposal was not required as the micro-cap company was not large enough to qualify for mandatory advisory voting in 2011 under Dodd-Frank. In the most recent Hemispherx proxy statement, released [...]
Compensation Policy: CEO Severance Pay and the Cost of Failure
October 7, 2011 in Board Diversity, Board Pay, CEO Pay, Corporate Governance, Executive Pay
By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Research Analyst What is the price of failure? With 14 million Americans unemployed, more people are paying attention to CEO pay packages. The unemployment rate has been over 9% since April 2009, but CEOs continue to collect multi-million dollar payouts, even as their companies deliver lack-luster returns to shareholders. Even though [...]
Going the extra mile in disclosure
July 25, 2011 in Executive Pay
By Ashley Kotzur – Compensation Analyst Those with a penchant for all things ‘Change in Control’ might be interested to hear that S&P 500 company NetApp, Inc. disclosed the first, in our experience, full “walk-away” figure in their recently filed 2011 proxy statement. This figure represents the total amount that an executive could leave the [...]
Think You Can Beat These Fringe Benefits?
July 22, 2011 in Executive Pay
By Greg Ruel – Research Associate Executive perks continue to raise eyebrows and put a spotlight on boards. After all, if these perquisites aren’t tied to performance in any calculable way, why even bother? Is it because if she doesn’t get these perks here, she will get them somewhere else? Perhaps the CEO is “accustomed [...]
GovernanceMetrics Executive Pay Scorecard: Some Early Evaluations
March 14, 2011 in Executive Pay
Proxy season is picking up and GovernanceMetrics International had published about 35 scorecards as of March 11th. That figure will increase substantially in the coming weeks as the vast majority of the S&P 500 roll out proxies. So far about 9 percent of corporations are registering a low concern with 15 percent generating enough flags [...]
Citigroup executive pay goes multi-year
February 24, 2011 in Executive Pay
Well, they did it. Citigroup went to a multi-year performance period. Stands back in amazement! It’s here in this 8-K filing. And what does multi-year mean in this instance? Two. Yup, that’s right. Two years. I thought if I made the point size bigger it might seem longer. Once a threshold of $12 billion in [...]
Qualcomm’s Executive Pay Scorecard a little bit of high concern
February 17, 2011 in Executive Pay
In almost a textbook demonstration of what has gone wrong with incentive compensation practices in many US companies – if it was ever right – Qualcomm’s decision to award 75 percent of its performance stock units to its executives even if it underperforms ALL its peers takes the biscuit. When our Compensation Analyst Team Leader [...]
Outrageous Arguments for Outrageous Pay
February 10, 2011 in Executive Pay
Move over, Marie Antoinette. Executives are no longer hiding their sense of entitlement for outrageous executive compensation. My new column at Bnet gives four appalling examples of recent attempts to pay executives avalanches of money. Look carefully — you won't find a single attempt to try to show the zillion dollar packages are based on [...]
Why does Eric Schmidt need any more Google shares?
January 27, 2011 in Executive Pay
You know, when Mary Thompson of CNBC wrote to ask me if I remembered anyone else getting anything like the $100 million stock award given to Google’s Eric Schmidt my first comment was: “Well, Larry Ellison awards himself that many stock options about once a year, so it’s not unusual for some.” But for Google, [...]
Ratings haiku VI
January 17, 2011 in Executive Pay
What price an option? Even in consistency, Inconsistency.
Wall Street Pay: Size Matters
November 30, 2010 in Executive Pay
Today, the CII released a White Paper that I wrote with assistance from our very own Greg Ruel and Michelle Lamb. It’s called: Wall Street Pay: Size, Structure and Significance for Shareowners. I re-read it yesterday as I had the faint suspicion that I might have to talk intelligently about it and I thought I [...]
Executive pay changes at Occidental Petroleum
October 14, 2010 in Executive Pay
So Stephen Chazen is chasing Ray Irani upstairs, becoming CEO while Irani is staying on as executive chairman? That’s no surprise. Though, of course, having the former CEO stay on as executive or non-executive chairman as part of your succession plan has generally tended to lead to disaster but let’s leave that to the side [...]
Executive Compensation at Savient Pharmaceuticals
August 16, 2010 in Executive Pay
The Corporate Library's concerns about executive compensation at Savient Pharmaceuticals have decreased. We note that the company issued performance-based stock options to three named executive officers for the first time in fiscal 2009. The options would fully vest if any one of the following conditions occurred before December 31, 2009: receipt of a “complete response [...]
“The Other Guys” — A Corporate Governance Saga
August 6, 2010 in Executive Pay
I have been accused of finding corporate governance relevance in unlikely places but even I never expected the closing credits of one of the most entertainingly silly comedies of the year to be essentially a PowerPoint presentation on the fine points of incentive compensation and Ponzi schemes. "The Other Guys" is the new Will Ferrell/Mark [...]
H&R Block’s executive compensation woes
July 28, 2010 in Executive Pay
The news that Thomas Bloch, the son of the co-founder of H&R Block (the son of the H bit, it turns out, Henry, who at 88 is still with us) and former CEO of the company is not standing for re-election to the board of directors is cause for surprise. Sounds like the Roy Disney [...]
Top ways boards can fix the pay problem
July 26, 2010 in Executive Pay
Finally, an Opinion article on CEO pay with which I can wholeheartedly agree. Jay, where have you been all my life? Published in this morning’s Agenda magazine, Jay Lorsch – Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at HBS – has hit the nail right on the head. Not only that but he says a bunch of [...]
Safety at the bottom of BP’s list too
July 22, 2010 in Executive Pay
I said I was going to check out BP's annual report and accounts to see what kind of safety measures were included in their performance measurement plans. Bizarrely enough, safety’s at the BOTTOM of the list again. Well, tied at bottom, with people. Employee attitudes? Hmmm, not great at the moment I fear. The remuneration [...]