Both former CEO's of General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) should pay back their combined half-a-billion severance packages to restore their reputations. Jack Welsh was awarded $417 million dollars when he parachuted out of the company in 2001 and Jeff Immelt should do the same with the $211 million he took in 2017.
That’s according to The Edge (who source underperforming companies for activist involvement, Special Situations and Spinoffs), stating that the 130-year-old GE is as close to collapse as it’s ever been thanks to the legacy of systemic weakness left by 83-year-old Welch and his 63-year-old successor Immelt.
Welch’s almost half-a-billion dollar payout (worth $600 million today) is believed to have been the largest severance package ever paid to any CEO in the history of corporate America.
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Both men earned hundreds of millions of dollars from GE in both salary and benefits, and when Immelt retired in 2017, he was paid $211 million. Given Welch’s admission that he would be judged on his chosen successor’s record, returning their severance packages would be a positive move given the dire state of the company now.
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The Edge says GE’s new CEO Larry Culp has a massive fight on his hands as he struggles with the $105.8 billion debt he’s inherited, and the futures of 20,000 salaried U.S. employees who have had their pensions frozen.
Even as dividends have been cut, a legitimate turnaround is still a long way off. Despite the appearance of GE taking the bull by the horns by announcing power plant closures, putting their subprime mortgage business into bankruptcy and detailing massive layoffs in America and Europe (including more than 1,000 US corporate jobs and thousands more in factories in France, England, and Switzerland), the future still does not look good.
Just last month, Culp was highly optimistic, revealing, “There’s still a lot to do, it is a reset year. But net-net, we’re pretty encouraged, I’m confident that in 2020, and in 2021, we’ll see meaningfully better performance for GE as a whole.”
However, sentiment dropped again after J.P. Morgan analyst Stephen Tusa issued a negative outlook and insisted GE’s core business earnings (before interest and taxes) are falling 10% short of the estimates it made in March.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2 ... dbc8bc787c