The time-honored employee stock option has seen better days.
Blackberry maker Research in Motion announced Tuesday that the company and four current and former officers have settled an options backdating case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Securities regulators on Wednesday charged Broadcom Corp. co-founders Henry T. Nicholas III and Henry Samueli with falsifying the company's reported income
Data storage equipment maker Brocade Communications Systems Inc. trimmed its revenue outlook but raised the lower bracket of its operating earnings forecast Wednesday, sending its shares sharply higher.
This year, Fortune's list of the highest-paid corporate leaders in Europe reads like a Who's Who of le tout Paris, with French executives taking ten of the 20 top spots, including first and second place. Carlos Ghosn, CEO of French automaker Renault, easily topped the list with $45.5 million (which doesn't include the millions he gets for also running Japan's Nissan, whose principal owner is Renault). That was more than seven times the size of his 2005 package and more than double that of the second-place CEO, Jean-Paul Agon of L'Oréal, with $19.3 million.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges Wednesday against chipmaker KLA-Tencor Corp. and its former chief Kenneth Schroeder in connection with an alleged scheme to backdate stock option grants.
Six Apple board members issued a statement of confidence Wednesday in the Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation's conclusion of a stock options probe into Apple, as well as CEO Steve Jobs' "integrity and ability to lead."
Apple's profit soared in the latest quarter thanks to strong sales of its iPods and Macintosh computers, the company reported Wednesday.
UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer by market value, restated results Tuesday for improper accounting of stock options and said the problems caused a more than $1.5 billion reduction in profit.
Apple Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs, whose company's stock-options practices are already the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission probe, agreed to a large stock-options grant to a key filmmaker at his Pixar Animation Studios in 2001 as well, according to a published report.
Federal prosecutors looking at allegations of stock-option manipulation at Monster Worldwide are focusing on emails written by the company's former general counsel that suggest he knew the accounting implications of backdated options, according to a published report.
Senior computer scientists at Adobe take home an average of $161,127 in total compensation annually. Which other Best Companies to Work For offer big paychecks?
Apple Computer disclosed in a regulatory filing Friday that Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs was aware that some stock options granted to him and other executives at Apple between 1997 and 2002 were backdated and that the company was restating financial results for the past few years as a result of the backdating.
Federal prosecutors are investigating stock option documents at Apple Computer that may have been falsified by company officials, a published report said Wednesday. The news sent the company's stock sliding, but the shares later recovered most of the lost ground.
The number of CEO departures rose higher in 2006 to 1,347 by the month of November, outpacing 2005's year-end total of 1,322, according to a report released Friday.
Word of mouth among corporate directors may account for the ever-growing number of corporations ensnared in the options backdating scandal.
More criminal indictments will come down the pike as corporate America struggles with the ever-growing stock options backdating scandal, according to an assistant director at the FBI.
Two more CEOs hit by the scandal over stock options stepped down Wednesday, highlighting the risk to companies - and investors - stung by the backdating bullet.
Security software firm McAfee Inc. said Wednesday that its chairman and CEO George Samenuk would step down following an internal investigation in the ever-widening options backdating scandal, sending its shares soaring.
As you peruse the Fastest-Growing list, you'll notice two glaring omissions: Google and Apple. The explanations for their absence are simple: A company has to have been trading for at least three y...
As you peruse the Fastest-Growing list, you'll notice two glaring omissions: Google and Apple.
The Securities and Exchange Commission will be conducting an informal inquiry into the KB Home's stock option grants, company officials said Thursday evening.
The widespread options backdating scandal is gaining new momentum after the Department of Justice charged executives from Comverse Technology with securities fraud for profiting from manipulated stock options.
For the past several weeks I've been asking experts (to be precise: lawyers) if they think the options backdating scandal is a big deal with major ramifications, a medium-sized brouhaha that will fade after the egregious abusers have been punished, or a tempest in a teapot we'll have forgotten by Christmas.
John Mutch, founder of the shareholder activist hedge fund MV Advisors, knows a thing or two about making money off troubled tech companies. These days, he's got his sights on those mixed up in the stock-options saga.
The Internal Revenue Service is the latest agency to look at stock option practices at a growing number of companies, according to a published report.
Barnes & Noble Inc. said Wednesday that its board audit committee will review the company' s past stock option practices, joining a growing list of companies conducting such reviews.
The list of companies being investigated in the stock-options saga grows longer by the day and could easily climb much higher, according to the professor whose research brought the issue to light.
Apple is investigating the timing of stock options granted to some employees, including one made to CEO Steve Jobs, the Cupertino, Calif.-based maker of iPods and Mac computers said Thursday.
One of the questions crying loudest from the developing scandal of backdating stock options is, Why now? As new companies announce daily that they're investigating their stock option practices or t...
One of the questions crying loudest from the developing scandal of backdating stock options is, Why now?
Stock options, a perennial thorn in the side of technology companies, have come back to haunt the sector in a big way.
Wanted to weigh in today about these withering markets.
Cisco Systems is seeking regulatory approval for a financial instrument that could allow the company to assign a lower value to the stock options than under current valuation models, according to media reports Thursday.
A band of tech companies will present an alternative method for valuing stock options that would provide lower expenses to the companies than legislation currently under review, according to a report published Tuesday.
The CEO's at the nation's largest companies saw their raises more than doubled in 2003 as the median raise handed out by S&P 500 companies to their top executives was 22.18 percent, according to a study by The Corporate Library.
On Jan. 13, employees of Agere Systems, the $1.9 billion semiconductor maker that spun off from Lucent in 2002, arrived at work to find a letter from CEO John Dickson in their in-boxes. A typical e...
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The rebound in U.S. corporate profits and return of the stock-market bull last year stoked a 16 percent raise in 2003 cash pay for America's top executives, most of the gain coming from a 20 percent rise in CEO bonuses.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board issued a formal proposal Wednesday calling for all forms of stock-based compensation, including options, to be included as an expense on companies' income statements.
Some tech investors are starting to show that they're sick and tired of companies not having to include the expense of stock options programs on their income statements.
For the second time in a decade, war has broken out between the group that sets the nation's accounting standards and much of corporate America. At issue are employee stock options, which publicly...
This year, workers at many companies will be confronted with something that had become unfamiliar to them: employee stock options that are actually worth something. The question now is whether they'll hang on, or take the money and run.
Okay, so it's been a rough couple of years for jobs. But lots of companies still want to be good places to work--and 59 of the companies on our seventh annual list actually added to their payrolls ...
Microsoft without stock options? It's like America without baseball, apple pie without apples. It's unimaginable, yet in this case it's real. Microsoft's announcement that it would no longer give e...
But the pigs were so clever that they could think of a way round every difficulty. --George Orwell, Animal Farm
Executives in Silicon Valley are whining loudly about the increasingly likely prospect of having to expense stock options. Their complaint is not just that they fear anything that eats into their h...
When good times go bad, the hunt begins for the wrongdoers. These days, in addition to the obvious targets--their ranks include Ken Lay and Gary Winnick--an innocent bystander is also getting maule...
On a clear summer's night a few years back, Sir David Tweedie stood on the deck of a boat slowly circling Manhattan and peered over the rail at the glimmering lights of Wall Street. Tweedie was abo...
Even at a time when hunting for the "next Enron" has become a national sport, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts would seem a highly unlikely target. The North Carolina-based purveyor of crullers and Hot Origi...
How much money did Dell Computer make last year? Depends on what you count. According to the income statement in its annual report, Dell's net profit in its most recent fiscal year was $1.25 billio...
Should we throw lawbreaking CEOs in jail? Of course we should. Could the SEC use more money to beef up enforcement? Well, duh. Do we need to figure out better ways to regulate and motivate the acco...
On a chilly April morning in Manhattan, nearly a dozen top investors gathered in the office of Christopher Davis, a portfolio manager at mutual fund company Davis Selected Advisors, to vent their f...
Ever since Enron's house of lies collapsed late last year, revelations of corporate abuses haven't let up.
Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson is not a touchy-feely guy. Even by Wall Street standards, he's fairly buttoned down. But the daily drumbeat of news about horrifying corporate behavior would get to a...
It isn't often you see a battle on Capitol Hill in which, from the minute it starts, you already know the players, you know their arguments, and you know who's right and who's wrong. But that's wha...
How we pick the 100 best
Near the end of May, General Electric stock was selling for just under $50 a share. At the same time, an option to buy a GE share for $55, valid until January 2003, was going for $6.90 on the Ameri...
For Jon Greeno, the past year has been a real roller-coaster ride. The up: Last August he exercised 500 options in the stock of his employer, Nortel Networks, and netted himself a quick $18,000. Th...
Here's a question we hope gets asked at the vice presidential debate on Oct. 5: Senator Lieberman, please defend your position on stock options.
Last June, power-tool wunderkind Joseph Galli, 42, left the prosaic, tactile world at Black & Decker and beamed himself into the realm of limitless potential as president of Amazon.com. Among the a...
Attention, job-hoppers: Before you bolt, beware. You may be forced to leave your employee stock options behind. I'm not just talking about unvested options. I'm talking about vested options and, in...
So what's the state of the workplace at the turn of the century? Go to Orange County, Calif., where twentysomethings Jennifer Withers, an administrative assistant, and her husband, Dave, a programm...
Texas Instruments knew it had to get into the stock options game to keep from losing top technical talent. But it didn't want to play by startup rules. Instead of doling out options to everyone--fr...
It's a do-it-yourself world. And when it comes to your employee-benefits plan, the new mantra is "Give me more choices, and let me manage them myself, thank you very much." After years of choosing ...
If you dropped into the lunchroom of any European company these days, you'd hear, in a weird, deja vu kind of way, the sort of talk common in America about two decades ago. Mixed with stock market ...
Not long ago Warren Buffett considered buying a big stake in a company that no doubt would have died to win over the Oracle of Omaha. But a close look made him uneasy: The company had an addiction ...
A decade ago it mattered only to corporate kingpins and a few lucky people in Silicon Valley. Now it has become a nagging question for millions of Americans: What do I do with all these dang stock ...
Ken Grunski, a 29-year-old information analyst at Electronic Data Systems in McLean, Va., thinks he knows a good deal when he sees one. In this case, it's his company's stock-purchase plan, which l...
Among the T-shirted techies who cram the dingy offices of NetGravity, a San Mateo, Calif., software startup, Stephen Recht stands out. He wears a tie. He is 45. He has a wife and a son and a house ...
All those stock options floating around Silicon Valley have long been considered the perfect motivator for a hungry, creative work force. But recently some acute observers have reflected on the dow...
Making the CEO an owner by granting stock options is supposed to get him to act in the interests of shareholders. But now that the bosses' potential share of the shares is at record levels, the dec...
After years under a merciless spotlight, CEO pay has been about as thoroughly studied as cholesterol. Trouble is, in both cases real life sometimes upsets what we think we know. Consider how last y...
FIGURING OUT what top executives get paid used to be like deciphering hieroglyphics: Even with years of training, it was slow going. Obfuscation of the proxy statement, where the numbers are report...
IF YOU ARE a manager or a professional working for someone else, chances are that money has been on your mind a lot lately, just after job security. The recession and modest inflation have induced ...
FROM THE DIN of the campaign trail to the cross fire at annual meetings, the issue of executive pay is stirring outrage and cries for reform. FORTUNE's survey of CEO pay at 200 of America's largest...
CEOS ARE PAID a lot to face facts, however unpleasant, so it's time they faced this one: The issue of their pay has finally landed on the national agenda and won't be leaving soon. It is now inevit...
Bad news for anyone who hopes to get employee stock options: Your chances just slipped a notch. It's nothing personal. The ever hotter issue of CEO pay has reignited a debate over what those option...
THIS COULD be the moment the great CEO pay bash starts winding down. Could be. We won't know until proxy statements come out next spring. But excesses of this past year produced an outcry that has ...
CONSIDER YOUR typical board of directors: 12 white males, one woman, and one black, each with a bio fit for instant inclusion in Who's Who in America. Are these eminences, like the wooden statues t...
INTEROFFICE MAIL doesn't get any better than this: the letter from the chairman telling you that Universal Widget's compensation committee, in its now obvious wisdom, thinks you are a key employee ...
The more you use large deductions to reduce your regular taxes, the more likely the alternative minimum tax will catch you. That's especially true if you make substantial charitable contributions o...
PSST, BUDDY, want a hot tip on the stock market? Well, whenever a company adopts a restricted-stock plan for its executives, you get out of that stock fast and invest in some other company that doe...
FROM EUROPE to the Orient, top managers are strikingly underpaid compared with their U.S. counterparts. Chief executives of 24 U.S. companies, including Du Pont, Sara Lee, Toys ''R'' Us, and Lotus ...
FIGURE THIS OUT: Last year was not a sterling one for Bally Manufacturing, the casino operator and maker of pinball machines. Among the diversified service companies on FORTUNE's Service 500, Bally...
$ In the next few weeks, shareholders' mailboxes will be stuffed with glossy annual reports and dull proxy statements. Companies will routinely celebrate their triumphs, blame their failures on for...
WHIPPED CREAM, caviar, the appropriate Chateau Lafite . . . Life's sweeteners come in many forms. Over the past 30 years an increasing number of executives have come to expect that theirs will incl...
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