Exxon CEO gets 144K per day... speechlessness over that

By JAD MOUAWAD

For 13 years as chairman and chief executive, Lee R. Raymond propelled Exxon, the successor to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, to the pinnacle of the oil world.

Under Mr. Raymond, the company's market value increased fourfold to $375 billion, overtaking BP as the largest oil company and General Electric as the largest American corporation. Net income soared from $4.8 billion in 1992 to last year's record-setting $36.13 billion.

Shareholders benefited handsomely on Mr. Raymond's watch. The price of Exxon's shares rose an average of 13 percent a year. The company, now known as Exxon Mobil, paid $67 billion in total dividends.

For his efforts, Mr. Raymond, who retired in December, was compensated more than $686 million from 1993 to 2005, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant. That is $144,573 for each day he spent leading Exxon's "God pod," as the executive suite at the company's headquarters in Irving, Tex., is known.

Despite the company's performance, some Exxon shareholders, academics, corporate governance experts and consumer groups were taken aback this week when they learned the details of Mr. Raymond's total compensation package, including the more than $400 million he received in his final year at the company.

Shareholder advocates point to what they describe as stealth compensation arranged for Mr. Raymond but not disclosed in proxy filings. Consumer groups complain that while last year's rise in global oil prices left many consumers feeling less prosperous, oil executives have become a lot richer from the higher prices. And some corporate governance experts argue that much of Mr. Raymond's pay came from easy profits generated by skyrocketing oil prices.

"It's entrepreneurial returns for managerial conduct," said Charles M. Elson, the director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "Exxon was there long before Mr. Raymond was there and will be there long after he leaves. Yet he received Rockefeller returns without taking the Rockefeller risk."

Exxon says that Mr. Raymond's compensation and retirement package was tied to the company's stellar performance. According to the company proxy statement, filed Wednesday, the package recognized his "outstanding leadership of the business, continued strengthening of our worldwide competitive position, and continuing progress toward achieving long-range strategic goals."

Through an Exxon spokesman, Mr. Raymond declined to comment.

Mr. Raymond certainly distinguished himself as an oil executive. Exxon is known in the business as a disciplined and tightly focused company with an obsessive attention to the bottom line. In 1999, Mr. Raymond pulled his biggest coup by taking advantage of a slump in oil prices to acquire Mobil in an $81 billion merger, at the time the largest ever.

Thanks to his strategy, the company each day produces 2.5 million barrels of oil — more than Kuwait — and 9.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas. It is the world's top refiner and controls 22 billion barrels of oil reserves, the most among its publicly traded peers.