Presidio Pay Blog

What’s News is a regularly updated summary of news stories, typically related to compensation, that we are following, find interesting, or find baffling.

Week of March 16th…

Lost this week among all of the AIG bonus calamity (our thoughts to come on this shortly) were a number of companies seeking shareholder approval for option exchanges:

• Google announced that approximately 93% of its underwater options granted to employees will be exchanged on a one-to-one basis.  Employees typically receive fewer number of options when they surrender their underwater options because they are trading in something they view as worthless for something of value, which is why many feel Google’s one-to-one exchange is quite a generous move.

• Starbucks Corp. won shareholder approval for their proposed option exchange.

• Ebay Inc hopes to allow employees to exchange their underwater options for a lesser number of restricted stock units.

• Eligible Motorola Inc employees can surrender their underwater options for either a lesser number of options or restricted stock units.

Common arguments that companies use when requesting option-exchange programs from shareholders include:

Read more…

Long-Term Incentives, Shareholder Issues, What's News

What’s News is a regularly updated summary of news stories, typically related to compensation, that we are following, find interesting, or find baffling.

Week of January 5th…

• In response to ten questions posed by a Congressional Oversight Panel, the Treasury Department admitted that they still have no way of determining if companies receiving TARP funds are complying with the executive compensation restrictions (Download the PDF).  This is really no surprise given Read more…

Legislation, TARP, What's News Exec Pay, Layoffs, Paycheck Fairness Act

The NASDAQ announced that it has created an index to track the stock price performance of certain companies who have received TARP funding.  Although it doesn’t include all of the companies that have received funding, we think this is a great first step in tracking the performance of our new portfolio acquisitions. (Don’t forget that if you pay U.S. taxes you now own these equities too!).  We’ve included the index quote below, so feel free to check in daily on the investments the Department of Treasury has made on your behalf.  Note that the index started at 1,000.

TARP, What's News