‘Tis the season…
While there’s lots of people who have decided to take the next two weeks off, we know one group that seems to be working extra hard: the lawyers, paralegals and other folks charged with writing some of the stuff we’re seeing in SEC filings. If Friday was any indication, the next two weeks should be chock full of lots of interesting disclosures, which we’ll be keeping an eye on, despite our own vacation plans.
One of the ones that caught our eye was the proxy filed by footnoted frequent flyer Scotts Miracle-Gro (SMG) late Friday. There was also this 8K announcing the departure of a director and a bonus payment for executive Barry Sanders.
But it was the proxy that was far more interesting, in part due to the change in the way that Chairman and CEO James Hagedorn is paid:
Effective October 1, 2008, the Compensation Committee approved a revised compensation structure for Mr. Hagedorn. The new structure, which increased Mr. Hagedorn’s base salary to $1.0 million, is designed, among other things, to incorporate the approximate value of the personal aircraft usage and commuting perquisites that Mr. Hagedorn had received in the past as part of his overall compensation package directly into his base salary.
When you start to drill down into the plane costs, you come across some new disclosures and some interesting ways of breaking up the costs across three separate footnotes — something that clearly took some extra hours for someone. There’s nearly $250K last year for use of his own plane on top of another $176.5K for using company-owned planes. And then there’s another $162K included in another footnote that are also plane-related and a $287K tax gross-up.
Need a scorecard yet? All of this is significantly higher than in 2007 when the company noted that a “family tragedy” was the reason for Hagedorn taking to the skies and that it “expect(ed) the value of this perquisite to be significantly lower in the 2008 fiscal year.”
We’re expecting more of these sorts of disclosures over the next two weeks.
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Posted in Tags: Friday filings |
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December 22nd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I’m sorry I didn’t see SMG on the bail out list. Why not focus on the companies and people sucking us dry? You obviously have a huge amount of time on your hands, so why not actually do your research and post about things we actually care about. Now if this CEO’s income was I don’t know triple that stated, I’d be upset; but so far one look at edgar and SMG profits clearly back up this kind of compensation. We are still a free market society, I see nothing out of line. Accept the five minutes I wasted reading your post which btw I never get back.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:27 pm
@s8tin: Sorry to disappoint, but if you’re unhappy with a post, you can skip that one, rather than wasting 5 minutes reading it (though it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly take you that long to read 338 words). You’re also more than welcome to start your own site reading filings and posting about those that you find worthwhile. Be sure to send me a link when you get that up and running.