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- Jim Johnson, a Goldman board member responsible for approving large pay packages for top executives including CEO Lloyd Blankfein, is moving on from that role.
- Johnson, the former CEO of Fannie Mae, has been a lightning rod for pay criticism at Goldman.
A Goldman Sachs board member in charge of approving eye popping pay packages for top executives including CEO Lloyd Blankfein is moving on from those responsibilities.
Jim Johnson, the firm's longest serving director and the chairman of the compensation committee, handed his position as chair of the board committee in charge of pay to fellow director Michele Burns on Wednesday during the bank's annual meeting.
Johnson, the former CEO of Fannie Mae, has been a lightning rod for pay criticism at Goldman and elsewhere, and has presided over compensation matters that placed Blankfein among the highest paid Wall Street executives in the years leading up to the financial crisis.
Blankfein earned $24 million in 2017, up 9% from the year prior.
In 2012, proxy firm Glass-Lewis & Co. recommended that shareholders vote against Johnson's reelection after an investor publicly voiced criticism amid concerns that pay wasn't appropriately tied to performance.
Two years ago, 33% of the votes cast by Goldman shareholders went against the firm's compensation plan, the most since such votes began in 2009. The rebuke led the firm to reexamine its pay plan and shift Blankfein's stock-based pay to being entirely reliant on the firm's performance from a typical practice of giving him roughly half based on results and half based on tenure.
More than 87% of the votes cast this year were in support of Blankfein's pay package for 2017.
Burns was the chairman and CEO at Mercer LLC, a human-resources consulting firm until 2011. She joined the Goldman board later that year.
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