Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo took home $10.8 million for 2007

Posted Apr 25th 2008 1:16PM by Zac Bissonnette
Filed under: Management, Countrywide Financial (CFC)

Countrywide Financial's (NYSE: CFC) corporate governance satire worthy of Gilbert & Sullivan continues with the release of the company's proxy statement.

CEO Angelo Mozilo's pay package dropped 79% -- to $10.8 million. Worse, president and COO David Sambol and managing director Andrew Gissinger III did not even come close to meeting the company's insider stock ownership guidelines -- which worked out well for them given the company's precipitous decline in value.

Just for laughs, here's an excerpt from the company's executive pay philosophy pulled directly from the proxy statement:

Pay for Performance. Our compensation programs are intended to motivate our named executive officers to achieve a superior level of performance in the diversified financial services industry. The amount of compensation for each named executive officer is intended to reflect the executive's experience, his or her individual performance and the performance of the Company. Several of our compensation programs are expressly tied to performance of the Company or the named executive officer, including our annual incentive awards program and our equity awards program. In general, our compensation is heavily weighted toward performance-based pay, and we seek to balance incentives for both short-term and long-term performance.

Here's my question. If you're a Countrywide director reading this, feel free to respond in the comment section: When you're stock declines from over $40 to under $10, how can your CEO earn $10.8 million under a pay-for-performance philosophy?

Perhaps Countrywide has a sense of humor, and the description of executive pay was meant to be ironic. But the company's shareholders probably aren't laughing.

Tags: CFC, Countrywide, Executive Pay, ExecutivePay, Mozilo