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$35 million for bogus expense reports? Mark Hurd's H-P payoff was just another routine day in the life of corporate America. How his parachute stacks up against 20 all-time malfeasants.
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd may be hurting from the media swirl around his alleged relationship with a contractor and false expense reports, but his wallet will stay fat thanks to a severance package valued at $34.6 million in cash and stock.
Click Image Below to View Our Rankings of 20 Outrageous Corporate Parachutes
AP Photo (3); Getty Images
And how’s the man Hurd succeeded as America’s favorite entitlement whipping boy, BP CEO Tony Hayward? He was exiled to Siberia and will leave his post in October—but not without a severance and pension package reportedly worth $17 million.
But Hurd and Hayward are hardly the best-paid paragons of corporate misfires. The Daily Beast inspected news reports and Securities & Exchange Commission filings spanning more than 25 years to find the 20 titans of industry who, despite very public professional failings, walked away with tens, even hundreds of millions in cash and stock.
To come up with our list of 20, we separated the leaders of industry into two groups—those who resigned or were fired under the taint of ethics scandals, and those who left because of professional failings. We then combined the 10 highest paid from each group—reflecting the total value of the exit packages—into our final list of 20.
Research by Clark Merrefield and Lauren Streib
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Well look at that, Franklin Raines was a worse scumbag than Ken Lay.... While scumbag Lay brought down an entire company - While Raines brought down a nations economy and caused a near depression - yet the press takes him into it's bosom and protects him like a fragile child compared to the boogie man they treated Lay as. If there was no liberal bias in the media and they treated all stories equal we may have stopped Fannie and Freddie before it was too late.
Baddchild, This is all about Carly not beating Boxer. Democrat corruption is a resume enhancement.
#18, Carly Fiorina Company: Hewlett-Packard Title: Chairman and CEO Years at Company: 1999-2005 Total Value of Severance Package: $40 million "After six years that saw a unsuccessful merger with Compaq, and a stock price that had been roughly halved, she left, with a push from the board, with a shattered reputation -and a parting package of roughly $40 million in cash and stock." Now she wants to run California. God help them.
Incredible!
Carly Fiorina....classic case of rewarding total incompetence... BUT!.....She's from California and now running for US Senator... Never Mind......
Make her spend it all Barbara!
Her campaign slogan should be, "I f*cked up HP, now Iet me f*ck up California." Despite bitter partisan politics, I don't know why anyone would vote for her. Although spending her entire $40 million parachute on the campaign will pump much needed funds into California's economy.
The worse they are the more money they get.
Certainly looks that way!!!
Genni2002, You said man, Just look at the teachers union.
Chuckie, count yourself among education's failures.
Of course, these "unemployment benefit" packages are outrageous, but they also raise the deeper question of how these miscreants got their CEO jobs in the first place. =Don't candidates for such lofty positions go through rigorous "vetting"? Aren't their employment histories, references, professional & educational credentials, etc. reviewed at least as thoroughly as an applicant for a teaching spot at the local high school? =The answer, I think, is as disturbing as the often-criminal behavior of these corporate titans. They are hired, in fact, BECAUSE of their manipulative abilities and flexible morality. =As long as "beating the system" (e.g, avoiding taxes through dubious dodges, keeping worker wages low by illegal union-busting and by sending jobs offshore) is seen as the quickest way to increased profitability--as opposed to investing in new technology, better worker training, long-range product development--people like those in this rogue's gallery will be sought after. =Should it be any surprise when, inevitably, such ethically-challenged individuals go "too far" and wind up defrauding their own companies?
These are the same companies that are refusing to use their piles of cash to hire people and help keep the econom afloat during this tough time because the're "nervous' and 'tentative' about spending the cash on training people. What I don't get is, what is going on with the multitude of business schools in America, where the MBA became the most popular and sought after graduate degree, that the seem to be cranking out not onl scoundrels but a paltr number of people capable of being CEOs, making CEOs so apparentl irreplaceable that their salaries are outrageous, and even when the fail, the walk awa with multiple millions?
Not only doe these people walk away with millions in cash and stock but they enjoy the wonderful tax breaks for the rich because ... you know these are the guys who generate jobs. Meanwhile Fiorina outsourced huge swaths of American high tech jobs overseas. What would be a great follow up story is a compare and contrast of how many of these executives actually created American jobs, not just paper valuations for stockholders.
Get your drop dead money in 4-5 and get out leaving a mess for your successor Just be sure to pay the board members enough so they go along with fleecing the shareholders Banksters don't care cuz they figured out how to play the same game with a better payout and government guarantees Its systemic moral rot From Jesses Cafe: "From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent." Now might be a good time to re-read The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson which appeared in The Atlantic Magazine. Although he keeps using the term "emerging market governments" in fact he is discussing a post bubble country that has experienced a period of excress, fostered by a partnership between business and government that is known as crony capitalism. Here is his description of the rise of the financial sector in the US from his book, 13 Bankers, which describes how the rise of concentrated financial power poses a threat to economic well-being is a must read as well. "The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry's ascent. Paul Volcker's monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services. Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007." I have not read his book yet, but it's on my list. I hope he includes some information on the decade long campaign to repeal Glass-Steagall, led by Sandy Weill and Robert Rubin, which opened Pandora's box in 1999. It is a mistake to view what happened as some accident, or a natural development. It was a pre-meditated campaign to subvert the economy and the political protections of the vast majority of US citizens. In the meanwhile, here are a few quotes from his piece in Atlantic Magazine which is a prelude piece to his book. Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason-the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit-and, most of the time, genteel-oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms. "Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or-here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique-the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk-at least until the riots grow too large." The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery. I am not so optimistic that this reform is possible, because there has in fact been a soft coup d'etat in the US, which now exists in a state of crony corporatism that wields enormous influence over the media and within the government. Let's be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power. This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains. But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."
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