The Advisors' Blog

This blog features wisdom from respected compensation consultants and lawyers

May 29, 2012

Say-on-Pay: Now 32 Failures – And Two Companies Fail In Consecutive Years!

Broc Romanek, CompensationStandards.com

I’ve added 14 more companies to our failed say-on-pay list for 2012! We are now at 32 companies that have failed to garner major support – with Chiquita Brands garnering support only in the teens (19.8%; see Mark Borges’ analysis of this failure)! Hat tip to Karla Bos of ING Funds for keeping me updated!

And Hercules Offshore became the first (41% support in ’11 and 48% in ’12) – and Kilroy Realty became the second (49% support in ’11 and 30% in ’12) – company to fail two years running…

And this list doesn’t include the recent voting results from Cablevision Systems – a company which did not have say-on-pay on its ballot this year because the frequency is triennial (per page 26 of their proxy statement; triennial was the choice of shareholders last year) – whose members of the compensation committee received less than majority support presumably due to pay issues. The company has a plurality vote standard so there is no direct impact of this vote. So this result doesn’t get picked up in the “failed SOP” count even though I would consider it to be a more serious failure than a nonbinding SOP vote…