Retroactive reduction in compensation
CEO and Chairman Arvind Krishna’s total compensation for fiscal year 2021 reached $17.56 million, including personal travel on company aircraft, which was valued at $128,000.
Tom Rosamilia, SVP of Software and chairman of North America reported a total of $8.1 million in total compensation for 2021, according to SEC documents. This includes personal travel on company aircraft which was valued at $60,570.
Michelle Browdy, SVP of legal and regulatory affairs and general counsel, received $6.65 million in total compensation last year.
Vice chairman Gary Cohn reported total compensation for 2021 of $9.9 million.
SVP and CFO James Kavanaugh received a total of $10.17 million for 2021.
Seems there is definitely room to fulfill the contractual compensation obligations around pension/healthcare. Those accounts read about in the article could be covered with just the cost IBM has paid towards personal air travel for the few executives I've outlined.
Additionally, the above compensation includes a total of no less than $20 million in stock options, shares that could have been liquidated to cover these existing contracts.
Now one may say that selling shares to cover these obligations would send a signal to the market and hurt Big Blue's stock price. However, if the company cannot afford to maintain it's contractual obligations, shouldn't the market know? Or alternatively, if they can afford it but are looking to continue boosting the bottom line, those of us who use their products should know that their method of doing so is to screw over the employees that helped them get there while flying executives around for vacation on the company dime, or paying for executive families to travel and attend corporate events, or even doing this to the retirees simply so they can hold on to those precious shares. Either way, IBMs behavior is unnecessary and therefore disgusting.