Ford paid CEO $3M in salary, perks in year it lost $14.6B

ByABC News
March 24, 2009, 10:59 PM

DEARBORN, Mich. -- That was about the same as General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner received, and GM lost a record $30.9 billion in '08.

Mulally got no bonus but was awarded stock options that a federal formula values at $8.5 million. Those are worthless, however, unless Ford shares more than double their Tuesday close of $2.86, down 4 cents. Including the stock options, Mulally's total was down 37% from 2007.

Ford paid an additional $14.7 million in salaries and perks to the next four highest-paid executives.

Jim Hossack, analyst at AutoPacific, says Mulally's pay isn't egregious. "He'll take a certain amount of flak for it, but it's a reasonable amount, given the grief that's associated with the job," Hossack says. "He's (CEO of) the one Big 3 that isn't taking government money."

GM and Chrysler, which is privately owned, are surviving on $17.4 billion in emergency loans approved by the Bush administration in December.

The Obama administration's auto industry task force is deciding whether the two should get $21.6 billion in additional loans they have requested. The administration intends to lay out a survival plan this week that GM and Chrysler must follow to get more emergency loans.

Mulally's perquisites included $344,109 for personal use of the company aircraft, a benefit that went away in December when the automaker announced it was selling the company planes. Ford hasn't yet found a buyer for the planes, but executives have stopped using them. Mulally and Chairman Bill Ford now use charter planes, at the company's expense, for personal trips.

The use of company planes for auto executives has been brewing as an issue in Detroit for some time, starting in 2007 when it was disclosed that Mark Fields, president of Ford's Americas operations, spent $517,000 of company money traveling from Detroit to spend weekends with his family in Florida. The issue boiled over in December, when the top brass from the Detroit 3 automakers flew in company planes to Washington to ask Congress for billions in bailout loans.