Jefferies Financial Group

Meeting March 28

 Total disclosed compensation for CEO Richard Handler for 2018 was $44.7 million. This figure includes multiple stock awards.

Last year 48.8% of shareholders voted against the package of $21.8 that appeared in the proxy statement. (Although the mega-grants that fed into this year’s extraordinary pay had been announced.) 

The company has amended some problematic areas of long-term plan and has filed a report on the changes.  However, while it raised the TSR performance range and implemented a relative TSR threshold beginning this year, the size of the awards remains quite high. In addition both the CEO and President received $4.5 million in a cash bonus. The executive vice-President and general counsel received $2.4 million bonus in addition to his salary of $1 million (an unusually high salary for someone in that role).

The overall pay is quite high compared to peers and performance. ISS Executive Compensation Analytics is offering new data to subscribers this year, and Jefferies fares poorly on each of the categories. In the multiple of median category Jefferies Financial score was 4.85: Handler’s pay was nearly 5 times the pay of the median CEO in the ISS peer group.

ISS is also measuring Relative Degree of Alignment (RDA) and here Jefferies score of (56.46) places it in the category of companies that grant high pay and achieve low performance over three years receive increasingly negative scores. It does not fare much better in ISS’s Pay TSR Alignment analysis with another negative score (48.23).