Check out this article on William McGuire at UNH. In last Thursday’s Nov 9 WSJ page B1, these two guys finally gave back some $390 M in stock options. This is the largest voluntary forfeiture so far but ht en consider how many he kept from the first article. IF they are admitting to backdating the options given them to cherry pick the best date, do they deserve any of this money ?
In their latest UNH news release , these two forgo some of these ill gotten gains. but they still get options, just tied to the highest price during the period instead of the lowest. Is this an ethical reward? If these guys had held up a convenience store they would be in prison, hold up the stockholders and you become a philanthropist in MN! Read this news release and see how smoothly they dance away from the real issue here. I have a definite ethical problem with retaining folks that so readily fed at the corporate greed trough. Remember how RSH fired their CEO for lying about a non existent college degree? Yet this sort of stunt is OK? And note they did not offer to return anything until the investigation proved that they had done wrong, Gee, no mea culpa from this bunch!
Expect a lot more investigations in the new Congress on this sort of thing. Okay McGuire turned the company around and made a big success of it, but how much reward is enough. I see that he gave a few million for park projects in MN, gee, I would hope so, for this kind of money he could own Minneapolis. Read the articles and tell us what you think!
DLE
Professor Elam 
Leave a comment