With his party in such a dire mess right now, you'd think that The Goracle would step in and try to clean up some of the slime, but no such luck, esp. when there's more cheddar to pocket from all the suckers out there:
Al Gore’s plan to hold a $100 million initial public offering for his cable company Current Media is generating some heat in BusinessWeek.
In a column published Thursday on the Web, Ron Grover, BusinessWeek’s Los Angeles bureau chief, recites a list of problems he has with the public offering — including how it would enrich the former Democratic vice-president.
The magazine estimates that Mr. Gore will pocket $48 million from the stock offering of Current Media, which has lost $31.5 million over the last three years. In addition, Mr. Gore and his business partner, Current Media’s chief executive, Joel Hyatt, will have “hammer-lock” control over the company in the form of a special class of shares that they will hold.
Mr. Grover notes that the two partners earned $491,677 apiece last year in cash, plus bonuses of $550,000 each. The two currently receive $600,000 a year in salary and are eligible for additional bonuses, according to the I.P.O. filing.
Mr. Grover compares that with the salaries of Google’s founders at the time of the company’s I.P.O. in 2004: The two earned a total of $356,556 in salary and bonuses for heading up a company that had earned nearly $106 million the year before.
But what really sticks in Mr. Grover’s craw is the share class structure the company will have following the offering. And apparently, Mr. Grover’s not alone in his opinion.
“That’s hardly democratic—with a large D or a small d,” a University of Delaware corporate governance expert, Charles Elson, told Mr. Grover. “The irony is that this is coming from a Democratic leader.”
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