Echoes of Bell in CEO pay

Michael Hiltzik
LA Times
October 3, 2010

As I beheld the sight of Robert Rizzo and his fellow Bell municipal bosses being frog-marched into court the other day on charges of having overpaid themselves outrageously at the expense of their suffering constituents, the following thought came to me:

Why not Ray Irani?

Maybe it's unfair to pick on the longtime chairman and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, since at $31 million last year, he places only fourth on Forbes' latest list of America's highest-paid executives.

If one is looking for overpaid CEOs, as ranked by their compensation relative to shareholder return, General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt, Verizon's Ivan Seidenberg and many others might deserve to stand ahead of Irani in the queue for the orange jumpsuit. (Those rankings come from Forbes too.)

(More here.)