Citi Shareholders Continue To Stick It To Vikram Pandit From Afar
For a number of years, while he was CEO of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit was paid a salary of $1/year, which he pledged to do until the bank turned a profit. And while the exercise probably started out like a fun little game, it became less and less fun the longer it went on. Vickles, once the happiest of all the chief executive officers on Wall Street, started to get downright depressed, so much so that people wrote whole articles reporting rare accounts of seeing him smile. The reason attributed to the frown turned upside down? Uncle Vik had started to feel a sense of hope; that he "[forsaw] the day when he [was] going to earn more than a $1 a year."
And then bam! Citi shareholders knock the wind right out of him. It would over a year until Pandit got a raise and then, 12 months later? Investors voted against the bank's executive pay plan, while letting it be known that they thought Pandit "collected millions of dollars in rewards too easily."
And while sure, he's basically moved on professionally, this has still got to hurt:
Citigroup Inc. shareholders on Tuesday approved the pay packages of the bank’s top executives, a vote of confidence for a bank that is trying to move forward after a tough 2014.
Shareholder commentary from the Garden State (Russell Forenza: "You guys say how great you are. I think you’re not so great") probably helped some, but not enough. These wounds don't heal that quickly.
Citigroup Shareholders OK Pay Packages, Proxy-Access Proposal [WSJ]
Related: Vikram Pandit Is Committed To Getting Paid; Citigroup Investors Don’t Care About Making Vikram Pandit Smile