Former Kodak CEO Antonio Perez received total compensation last year of nearly seven and a half million dollars. That information is contained in the 2013 proxy statement just filed by the company. Perez's salary of just over a million dollars was about the same as it was the year before, but he also received a bonus and stock awards totaling over five million dollars.
This happened during a year in which Kodak emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A Kodak spokesman points to language in the proxy statement which says that the board of directors' compensation committee looked at various factors including paying the CEO at a median for similarly sized companies as well as Perez's leadership during the Chapter 11 process.
At Brighton Securities, George Conboy says this is pretty typical for a number of corporations, and he says there's not often much push-back on executive compensation from the boards of those companies.
“It is not uncommon at the top levels of corporate America, and one of the reasons of course is, CEO’s help to engineer their own boards of directors and expect those directors to look kindly on their compensation packages. “
RIT Professor of Accounting Dan Tessoni says that it would be unusual in corporate America for the stockholders to have a lot of influence over what a chief executive gets paid.
“You would have to own a significant percentage of the publicly held stock in order to have the influence to elect your own board.”
Kodak shareholders can vote on executive pay packages but only on an advisory basis. Kodak holds its annual shareholder meeting May 28th in New York City.
Perez resigned from the CEO position last month, and Jeff Clarke was named to that job.
