Carly Fiorinna's Huge Severance Package

$21 million!!!   That's for poor performance too!  HP Shareholders must be livid!  Time to also get clean up the board of directors!  They're all cleaning the HP bank account as we speak. 

Like a hot baseball free agent, Carly Fiorina demanded and got a rich
pay package when Hewlett-Packard Co. lured her away from Lucent
Technologies Inc. in 1999. But she failed to become the corporate
equivalent of Roger Clemens.

Her 1999 pay
included almost 1.5 million shares of stock, then valued at $65.5
million, plus a $3 million signing bonus. Since then she has piled up
millions more. And while HP's board ousted her Wednesday as chairman,
president and chief executive, she won't be leaving poor: Her severance
package is worth at least $21.1 million.

Those who agitate for CEO pay to be linked to performance said they are disgusted by her severance package.

"What
would she get if the firm had done well? A country?" asked Jeffrey
Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale School of Management.

While
her total compensation was nowhere near the heights of Silicon Valley
-- Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs cashed in $74.8 million in
options in 2003 and eBay Inc. CEO Meg Whitman took home a total of
$42.6 million -- HP's performance hasn't come close to those companies'
results.

Just look at stock market performance: HP's stock has
been almost flat for two years and is down two-thirds from its 2000
peak, while Apple's share have quadrupled in the last year and eBay's
are still a high flyer even after a big drop in recent months.

The
HP board shoulders much of the blame for both Fiorina's pay and her
failure, according to Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at the
Corporate Library, which monitors corporate governance.

"The
board delivered this compensation to her in the beginning,
front-loaded, with a massive value not related to performance," he
said. "It has not instituted proper pay systems for her and now finds
itself in the position of having to terminate her without cause
because, like every other company, they don't include a 'poor
performance' clause as reason for termination in their contract."

"The
board has really betrayed the trust of the stockholders," Hodgson
added. "If the board had exercised proper oversight not only of the
strategy she was adopting, but also of her compensation, we wouldn't be
in this situation."

While Fiorina did decline additional
retention bonuses the board offered, she still took home $16.8 million
in non-stock pay since she joined the company.

At the end of
2003, she had options to buy 3.2 million shares of stock, including a
2003 grant to buy 700,000 shares of HP for $15.75 a share over the next
four years. In 2003, the last year for which figures are available, the
amount of options given to Fiorina during the year accounted for 1
percent of total options granted to all employees.

The company
has helped her with her mortgage, relocation expenses and taxes related
to relocating, for a total of $1.6 million between 1999 and the end of
2003.

It also paid for the expense of her personal travel on
Hewlett-Packard jets, for security reasons, according to the company.
Those trips were valued at $184,561 during her time at the company. Her
retirement pay, which, according to the company's proxy, will be
calculated according to her years of service, will likely be
six-figures a year.