The Ides of March may have been unlucky for Julius Caesar, but it was a pretty good day for Raymond Milchovich. That’s because March 15th is the day that Milchovich, the Chairman/CEO of Foster Wheeler, Inc., (a subsidiary of Foster Wheeler AG) (FWLT), signed an agreement to retire as CEO on May 3 ... Read more

Some companies put together pay packages designed to keep top executives around until they retire. At newspaper chain Gannett (GCI), it’s almost like the board can’t wait for them to find the exit. Proxies these days lay out just what companies will have to shell out in various c ... Read more

Three cheers for performance-based incentive awards! That’s the bedrock of American-style executive compensation, right? Pay for performance: It’s good for shareholders, the tax code encourages it, and such (we imagine) is the stuff of Pay Czar  Ken Feinberg ’s dreams. T ... Read more

At the beginning of February, CIT Group, Inc. (CIT) announced that its president and Chief Operating Officer, Alexander Mason, would leave the company on February 26th. Mason joined the company June 16, 2008, putting his tenure there at just over 19 months. When the announcement was made ... Read more

As we flipped through the preliminary proxy that supermarket chain Safeway (SWY) filed the other day, we found ourselves humming “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” — that song by the Gershwin Brothers that was famously sung by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald: You ... Read more

While we haven’t yet seen the new movie  Alice in Wonderland , we definitely felt like we had fallen down a rabbit hole when we read Airvana, Inc.’s (AIRV) recent merger proxy . The Chelmsford, Mass-based company, which sells network infrastructure products to the wireless compani ... R ... Read more

One key principle here at footnoted is that the small stuff does matter. Look no further than Vinod Gupta, who, yesterday evening, became the Securities and Exchange Commission’s poster child for perks run amok. Of course, in Gupta’s case, the little stuff turned out not to be so ... Read more

Here’s one reason companies might want to work extra hard to disclose employment contracts sooner rather than later: Delays can raise more and thornier questions. Consider Coventry Health Care Inc. (CVH), the $3.5 billion managed-care company based in Bethesda. It filed its 10-K on Feb ... Read more

It’s a rare day when corporate America cites the Internal Revenue Service as a bastion of restraint and sober perspective — especially when it comes to personal income. Yet there on page 35 of the proxy filed by consumer-products conglomerate Fortune Brands Inc. (FO) is a table ... Read more

I was in Chicago earlier this week working on some integration issues with the folks at Morningstar, but found time to tape this video on proxy season which is going on right now. You can watch the video here: ... Read the full post ... Read more