By Colin Kruger
Barely three years have passed since Doug Pertz signed up at Brambles to lead the document storage group it was about to spin-off – Recall.
The company has now officially shuffled off into the arms of US rival Iron Mountain, part of a $2.5 billion takeover.
It's been the cherry on the cake for Recall investors, who have had a pretty amazing run on the ASX.
And, come to that, what a bountiful three years it has been for the Altanta, Georgia-based Doug.
Illustration: John Shakespeare.
He didn't even have to wait for the company to perform before his bonuses started kicking in.
There was the $920,000 "transition bonus" when the company listed in December 2013, eight months after he joined.
And the one-off grant of $US6 million of rights under its performance share plan "to recognise the opportunity he forfeited upon leaving his previous employer to join Recall".
Two-thirds of the "performance" hurdle requires Pertz to hang in there for a few years.
The shares were to be held in trust until the fourth anniversary of his employment in 2017, but we won't have to worry about that now that it has been taken over.
As for the "real" performance hurdles (you know, the ones based on how the company has actually performed), the kerfuffle at last year's shareholder meeting was over just what happens to these performance-based share rights in the event of a takeover.
Shareholders lobbed a pretty hefty "no" vote at the granting of 581,339 performance share rights because "under the change in control policy that has been adopted by the board for this transaction, all LTI rights, including the CEO's LTI rights, will vest at target level in the event of a change in control," as the company said in its notice of meeting.
"The board retains the discretion to allow vesting of all LTI rights up to the maximum level."
If this happens Pertz ends up with roughly 3.4 million Recall shares.
And based on the value of the Iron Mountain bid when shareholders met this week, it adds up to a $28 million swag for Doug to take home from Recall before seeing if the new bosses at Iron Mountain still require his services.
Off Target
Back in retail land, while Wesfarmers' Richard Goyder was hypnotising everyone with its Houdini trick to make all the unpleasantness at Target disappear, some of Woolworths' alumni were making news offshore.
Former Woolies boss and chairman of CBD publisher Fairfax Media, Roger Corbett, will step down from the board of US retail group Walmart in June after 10 years as a director.
The company also announced that Corbett's former Woolies colleague, and current head of Walmart's US business, Mark Foran, took a hefty pay cut – his compensation fell to $US11.5 million from $US19.5 million.
Not that it necessarily reflects a poor performance from the man who was overlooked at Woolies in favour of Grant O'Brien. Apparently he got a big stock award the previous year to celebrate his promotion.
One of Foran's big ideas for Walmart this year is to push it into the fresh food business. We wonder where he got that idea from.
10, 9, 8 ...
Nine chief Hugh Marks won't have much time to breathe a sigh of relief at the network extracting itself from its ham-fisted adventures in Lebanon before considering its woes on the financial front.
Ten's financial results confirmed on Thursday that it had increased revenues and pegged back the losses from its broadcast business.
The debate continues over whether this is a dead dog bounce or the start of a comeback, but the one certainty is the grief this causes its larger rivals, Seven and Nine, which managed to cushion themselves from the anaemic industry revenue growth by eating Ten's lunch.
Ten reported that its share of the revenue pie rose a significant 2.5 per cent to 23.4 per cent.
The days when Nine and Kerry Stokes' Seven Network were each grabbing more than 40 per cent of revenue must seem like a long time ago.
No wonder Nine has installed Peter Costello as its new chairman. If our former treasurer can't convince his former government colleagues to cut the commercial TV industry's $173 million annual licence fee, who can?
Got a tip? ckruger@fairfaxmedia.com.au