Runaway CEO pay, a longtime pet peeve of shareholder activists and corporate governance experts, is about to take center stage in Washington, D.C. In a copy of the confidential letter obtained by USA TODAY, the pension funds cited research showing that CEO pay at many companies in the Russell 3000 index (representing 99% of the U.S. stock market) bore no relation to how well those companies performed.
At 60 of the worst-performing companies in that group, which lost $769 billion in market value over the past five years, the aggregate pay for the top five executives of those 60 companies over the same period was $12 billion. |