as they say, ditch and run before your money is gone

I like how he's trying to spin it like he's doing something noble for the company...pathetic.

So how big will HIS fare-thee-well package be? Since it seems on wall Street that the bigger the failure, the bigger the parting package, Charles should get a pretty hefty settlement for his failures.

It seems that working your way up over the years to become the CEO, then jumping ship (or being pushed off) guarantee's you a "life on the island in the hammock drinking a cocktail" retirement.

You must supply your own "cute babe" which should be no problem with all that loot.

According to the SEC filing ([sec.gov]) Charles Prince has the following available to him post-Citigroup (all US$):

Accumulated Pension: $1.7M
Unvested Stock Awards: 75% of 198k shares (4 annual installments starting Jan 2007)

As he "voluntarily resigned", the filing says he gets to keep his unvested stock awards.

Finally, it's "General Policy" that severance cash awards cannot "exceed three times the executive officer's annual income".

@darkclawsofchaos: Yes, resign while they can still afford to pay you millions in severance. Any CEO resigning after such being such a miserable failure should get nothing - zero. They already have millions from their regular paychecks, they need no more.

@vex:

"Golden parachutes" are one of the few things in executive pay that really makes sense. By offering a really, really sweet severance package, you compensate your executive for the risk of lost income after a less-than-grateful departure.

I mean, would you take a position at a company that might cause you to become permanently unemployable? How would you feel if your severance package were enough to make sure you didn't have to be employable? :)

@hapless: There are always companies looking for failed CEOs. They'll never become unemployable. You could always run Chrysler.

I love the hypocrisies of the masses! Up in arms about a CEO getting a few million dollars, but when an uneducated 20 year old gets the same amount to run around with a football - it's no big deal. CEOs have to plan 20 years ahead and steer a company through all kinds of unpredictable situations. They are like a top pick quarterback, but instead of 32 NFL teams, there are thousands of companies all jockeying for the same talent. So to continue the analogy, to entice the talent to come to your team, you include all kinds of perks - one of which is a nice severance package clause. If you don't like it, sell your Citibank stock. If you have none, why do you care?

@hapless: "golden parachutes" to spectacular-failure CEOs make even less sense than ridiculous overpayment while they're actively running the company into the ground. If I screwed something up so badly that it cost my employer several times my salary and they decided they didn't want to let me hang around long enough to do that again, they wouldn't offer me lots of extra cash to go away quietly. If you help lose a company billions of dollars, shouldn't you BE unemployable?

I'd love it if I thought I could create some monumental disaster at work, collect a few million and live off the proceeds for the rest of my life. I would've engineered something well before now! If there's no penalty for failure, why bother to reward success? And if you get the rewards regardless of your success, why try to improve?

It's disgusting and wasteful that public corporations are paying their CEOs they way they are. It's decadent and not justifiable. CEOs deserve to be rewarded for their success, and if you want to overcompensate them, give them LONG TERM stock options (or even awards) so that they are incented to build the company over the long haul (to avoid short-term sabotage that makes the books good long enough to collect this year's multi-million-dollar bonus.)

@The_Duke: The problem is that you'd basically need to divest yourself of investments in any US public company, because they all stupidly overpay their execs. It's only a little grating when the company is profitable and growing, but when the execs still get huge bonuses and payments while they're driving the company into the ground, they deserve to get "cut from the team" (to continue using your sports metaphor) and not paid off to leave.

I personally think athletes are ridiculously overpaid as well, but I've no ownership interest in any sports leagues or teams, don't buy their silly products and don't buy tickets to their games (or "season passes" to their broadcasts) so I just write that off as other suckers footing the bill for that.

Also, I think that if the NFL and NBA collapsed due to mismanagement, it wouldn't wreck our national economy. It's more important that CEOs be competent (and therefore more important to reward competence and penalize incompetence) than it is for football owners and coaches and players to be any good.

Nice, drop the problem on someone else's lap... What a jackass..