Hidden Gems in Oxy’s Proxy Filing

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Many of the most interesting nuggets on executive pay are buried so deep in the new corporate filings that it helps to bring along a calculator and a shovel — like Occidental Petroleum CEO’s $416 million salary, the New York Times reports.


The Securities and Exchange Commission’s new disclosure rules were supposed to make it easier for investors to understand how top managers were being paid. But piles of new data and proxy statements that are about as easy to parse as the federal tax code have even experts scratching their heads.


“There is an awful lot of stuff you have to wade through to get to the stuff that matters,” said Jannice L. Koors, a compensation consultant at Pearl Meyer & Partners. “We are now in the business of data mining.”


Among the choice details recently unearthed in recent filings:


Ray R. Irani, Occidental Petroleum’s chairman and chief executive, is so far the highest paid corporate chief whose compensation package was tallied under the new rules. His total pay was about $52.1 million last year, according to an analysis by Equilar, the executive compensation research firm. But that was just the amount that Occidental’s board awarded him last year.


In fact, he took home a lot more. First, there was the $270.1 million in profit from stock options he cashed out in 2006. Then there was the $93.3 million that Mr. Irani withdrew from a huge deferred stock plan that was revealed for the first time this year under the new rules.


Read the full New York Times story

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