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 There seems to be a special at the dollar store these days: CEOs and other top executives. Highly compensated corporate and financial top brass
seemingly seeking to erase the target on their heads painted on by the
seething masses of "Main Street" financial vigilantes and angry congressional
leaders are taking massive pay cuts. In most cases these pay cuts are
something of a symbolic gesture as these executives tend to have
accrued massive stock ownership in their companies, but these gestures
may keep them away from the public guillotines nonetheless. The
newest among the breed of $1 CEOs are Noam Gottesman, chairman and
co-CEO, and Emmanuel Roman, co-CEO, of publicly traded hedge fund GLG
Partners Inc. (NYSE:GLG). Joined by the chief executives is Pierre LaGrange, GLG's
senior managing director. According to a March 26 8-K filing,
all three agreed to a $1 salary effective April 1, 2009, through Dec. 31
2009. Gottesman and Roman each earned about $4.4 million in total compensation in 2007, according to an April 2008 proxy filing, while LaGrange earned $1 million for the year. The pay cut, however, does not include their sizable stock holdings. According to the April proxy, the three combined hold a 53.3% stake in GLG. The trio may have taken salary cuts in an effort to keep the fund's investors from jumping ship as GLG, like its hedge fund peers, has suffered performance declines and sharp redemptions over the past year. GLG reported $1.3 billion in redemptions in its emerging-markets funds in the third quarter ended Sept. 30, and the New York firm had said in its quarterly report that directors of five of its funds altered the terms of redemptions or suspended them entirely. The GLG execs join the likes of American International Group Inc. (NYSE:AIG) chief executive Edward Liddy, who recently told Congress that he is taking a $1 salary for 2008 and 2009, a somewhat noble move considering Liddy came aboard after AIG failed. Perhaps even more noble have been the decisions
of Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, president Larry Page
and president Sergey Brinn to forgo mammoth paychecks over the past
three years, instead taking $1 annual salaries. All three also passed
up on bonuses for 2008, despite the success of their world-dominating
search engine, according to a proxy statement filed on Tuesday. But don't worry. The brains behind Google won't be joining the bread line anytime soon as each of them are billionaires many times over based on the value of their stock holdings in the company, and still rank high on Forbes' annual billionaires list. - Michael Rudnick See 8-K filing from SEC
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