General Electric's Immelt Declines Bonus
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- General Electric (GE) - Get Report boss Jeffrey Immelt turned down a bonus for the second straight year.
Nor did he receive a raise, according to a proxy filing with the
Securities and Exchange Commission
Friday. His base salary came to $3.3 million, the same as a year ago, and the year before that. Immelt's wages haven't changed since 2005, GE said in the filing, though he CEO took home compensation worth more than $14 million in 2007 because of bonuses and stock awards.
Immelt's total pay for 2009, by contrast, amounted to about $9.9 million, "essentially unchanged from 2008," the company said in the filing, except for a $4.4 million boost in the value of his pension, "which is a function of the change in the discount rate and his age and service period."
GE said that the board's compensation committee "believes that Mr. Immelt performed well in 2009 by executing on the company's performance framework and by delivering a strong financial performance despite the depth and severity of the recession."
Shares of the industrial conglomerate ended trading Friday at $16.35 after gaining 24 cents during the regular session. The stock has traded relatively flat since reaching a 52-week high of $17.52 in September. Its all-time highs near $60 came nearly a decade ago, in 2000.
-- Written by Scott Eden in New York
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Scott Eden has covered business -- both large and small -- for more than a decade. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, he worked as a features reporter for Dealmaker and Trader Monthly magazines. Before that, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, that city's weekly paper. Early in his career, he was a staff reporter at the Dow Jones News Service. His reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Men's Journal, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the Believer magazine, among other publications. He's also the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a nonfiction book about Notre Dame football fans and the business and politics of big-time college sports. He has degrees from Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis.
