Citigroup shareholders unhappy with the company's performance have rejected a proposal to increase the CEO's pay to $15m:
Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, turned around this week to find that the crowd of supporters he thought he had at his back had melted away. Without an overt campaign or agitation from a leading activist, shareholders simply refused to approve his $15m pay package.
He was not the only one to be shocked when over half of the votes cast on pay at the bank’s annual meeting were against or withheld. The vote made Citi the first big, financial company in the US to have suffered such a defeat. Patrick McGurn, general counsel at shareholder voting agency ISS, says the rebellion came out of the blue. “We hadn’t heard any drum beat about pay.” […]
At Citi, investors have suffered 90 per cent decline in their shares over the past decade. A cash bonus of $5.3m and $8m in deferred stock and cash for Mr Pandit rubbed salt into their wounds.
Facing similar pressure, Barclays' CEO attempted to appease investors by foregoing $4.4m of his $40m in compensation.
After a series of bruising meetings with Barclays’ biggest shareholders over the past few weeks, Bob Diamond, chief executive, volunteered on Thursday to forgo half his 2.7 million pounds bonus for 2011 until Barclays had improved profitability.
The concession came a week before what was expected to be a stormy annual meeting at which some of Barclays’ leading owners had threatened to oppose its multimillion-pound executive pay scheme.
Barclays has come under fire from many of its largest investors — led by Standard Life Investments and including Fidelity, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership and F&C Asset Management — after it revealed that Mr Diamond’s take-home pay last year was 25 million pounds, including a 5.75 million pounds tax equalization payment. Many investors had said they would vote against the remuneration report and against directors on the remuneration committee at the meeting next Friday.
The SEC is drafting a requirement for companies to disclose their ratio of CEO to median pay, as firms such as JP Morgan continue to
boost executive salaries. While Dimon's bounty continues to swell, the CIO of JP Morgan had her salary cut by nearly 7%. Income is expected to decline at the division, whose traders hold market moving positions so big one has been dubbed
the 'London Whale':
A JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader of derivatives linked to the financial health of corporations has amassed positions so large that he’s driving price moves in the $10 trillion market, traders outside the firm said. […]
Iksil has earned about $100 million a year for the chief investment office in recent years, the Wall Street Journal said in an article following Bloomberg News’s initial report, citing people familiar with the matter.
Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew, who runs the unit, was among JPMorgan’s highest-paid executives in 2011, earning $14 million
As the well connected collect larger paychecks, the wages of regular workers continue to decline. If it had merely kept up with
gains in productivity, the average household income would
be $92,000, nearly double the current rate. Instead, when measured in
hours of labor the cost of necessities like oil have risen more than fivefold:
Image source:
The Big Picture