PayWatch: Exxon Mobil CEO Takes the Money While Customers Struggle with High Gas Prices

by James Parks, Apr 10, 2006

When senators called CEOs of the major oil companies to Washington, D.C., last November to answer charges of price gouging, Exxon Mobil’s CEO Lee Raymond was the star witness. His company was making profits at a rate of $75,000 every minute.

At year’s end, Exxon Mobil had rung up a record $36 billion in profits. Raymond denied the company did anything wrong. It merely took advantage of the law of supply and demand, he said.

But as the average consumer struggled to keep up with rising gas prices, Raymond took a retirement package that assured he wouldn’t ever worry about fuel costs.

According to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch, Raymond will receive an estimated annual retirement benefit of $6.5 million or he can take a cash payout of $81.3 million. He’ll also get an administrative assistant, as well as company-provided life insurance.

Raymond’s pension benefit is the second largest among CEOs in the United States after Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell. Coincidently, McKinnell serves on the Exxon Mobil board of directors. Both CEOs have been members of the Business Roundtable, a group that supports privatizing Social Security and is fighting rules that would require companies to reveal the total compensation for CEOs, including retirement packages.

Raymond also drew fire from environmentalists because he was one of the major proponents of expanding oil drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, something even the environmentally challenged Republican Congress voted down.

But finding ways to make money without regard to much else is business as usual for Raymond, according to The Nation magazine, which said this about him during the Senate hearings:

Where Lee Raymond comes from, there are no excess or windfall profits. There are only profits. Think of him as a big brown bear breathing heavily and grunting through the forest when he encounters a large, honey-filled beehive, which has blown down from a tree limb and landed in front of his schnuffling nose. It would never occur to him to think of other, less fortunate bears. He simply eats the honey. To Raymond, making $75,000 a minute is not an abuse of the free-market system; it is the free-market system.

The 2006 Executive PayWatch website, released April 6, features case studies of out-of-this-world CEO retirement packages and all-new data on CEO compensation. Since the first annual PayWatch site was released in 1997, more than 22 million have used the website to track data on CEO pay and the corporate abuses that cause it to soar.

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