For Citi's Pandit, $1 a Year Is About Right

Citigroup's (NYSE:C) shareholders/owners did a shocking thing yesterday. They acted like they own the place. As a matter of law, of course, they do. But anybody who's paid the slightest attention to Wall Street pay knows that until now shareholders/owners have been missing in action.

Now they've latched onto what in the past was a radical idea. Namely, that chief executives like Citi's Vikram Pandit should only receive gigantic pay packages tied to performance after they've actually performed.

With pay like this, "perform" shouldn't involve merely cutting costs or restructuring a dinosaur on government life-support. It should mean creating real-live wealth. The sort that Citi's shareholders/owners can actually take to the bank.

Pandit hasn't done that yet, which is why his board should do more than issue statements about what a "serious matter" a thumbs down from shareholders/owners represents. The board should show that it takes orders from the shareholders/owners, and not from the hired help, by restoring Pandit's pay to its 2009 and 2010 level of $1 per year.

Here are some other reasons Pandit shouldn't receive a red cent more:

• Pandit has already cashed in. Citi paid him $241 million just to come on board. It would take the average American family 5,333 years to make that much. The near quarter-billion included $165 million for Pandit's stake in Old Lane Partners, a hedge fund operation that Citi shut down not long afterward.

• Pandit's proposed $15 million 2011 pay package is for a year when Citi's shareholders/owners suffered a 44% decline in the value of their stock.

• The notion that his salary is actually tied to performance is a joke. That's because the board's profit metric could best be described as EBBT — or Earnings Before Bad Things. Under Citi's bonus plan, Pandit and three colleagues stand to collect their millions if Citicorp, Citigroup's operating businesses, posts $12 billion in cumulative pretax earnings for 2011 and 2012. That's less than half what those businesses earned in 2009 and 2010. What's more, the low bar ignores Citi Holdings, which holds the junk stuff that Pandit is aiming to sell or shutter.

Neil Weinberg is the editor-in-chief of American Banker. The views expressed are his own.

Questions from the Editor: Is "say on pay" producing a benefit to investors? What do you expect from upcoming shareholder votes at other banks? Post a comment below.