It might be the SEC’s largest ever financial penalty against a public company’s executive, but to Angelo Mozilo, $67.5 million is pocket money, especially as Bank of America is liable for $45 million of it so Mozilo will only pay out $22.5 million of it. That’s barely the price of a single year’s cash bonus for the man.
In the good old days, anyway.
And as a percentage of the cash he milked out of the Countrywide cow it would barely register at 10 percent.
I don’t think anyone needs reminding, but just in case, Angelo Mozilo was the preposterously overpaid CEO of Countrywide Financial which was one of the worst culprits when it came to selling overpriced sub-prime mortgages to people who could not afford them. He barefacedly defended his outrageous pay demands and pay levels to a congressional committee in the midst of the crisis, and sold share after share before the collapse of the company and its subsequent purchase – something of an albatross around the neck this – by Bank of America.
Of course, The Corporate Library already knew that this was in the pipeline back in August 2004. Honest. Check it out. We told you so. It’s right there on the web in black and white.
At least he’s banned from ever serving as an officer or director of a publicly-traded company ever again. Which is more than you can say for Mr. David “Even smaller fine” Sambol and Mr. Eric “Smaller fine still” Sieracki, the COO and the CFO, respectively, who are banned for three years and one year respectively.
And all this without admitting and wrongdoing. Well, the SEC is not the only one after Mr. Mozilo, so you don’t want to go saying you actually did anything. It’s incredible how much appalling behavior there was in the nation’s financial companies without any actual wrongdoing. What happened to the concept of “owning up”?
Paul Hodgson – Senior Research Associate