Attorney General Martha Coakley on Friday said she will use her statutory authority to begin the process of compelling Northeast Utilities to release a full accounting of chief executive Thomas J. May’s 2012 compensation.
The public company, which merged with NStar last April, has refused to disclose what May earned in the first three months of 2012, when he was still head of the Boston utility, citing a technicality in the reporting requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Because NStar no longer exists as its own public company, SEC rules say it need not report what May earned during the quarter before the merger closed, including any bonuses or the millions in accelerated stock awards he was expected to get.
Comments
Go Coakley!
Sorry Martha, you had your chance, this should have been negotiated prior to the merger, not months afterward. Time to move on, there are only 24 hours in a day, time spent trying to make political hay means less time looking at more pressing issues. Maybe NE Utilities will release the information one day, there will be a hue and cry, but May will get his money and it won't affect rate-payers one bit.
The evolution of this story is yet another real life morality play, with the various actors revealing bits of themselves with each new scene in the drama. The esteemed Governor managed to wear the wrong after-shave for this scene. He came out of it smelling like he was protecting the forces of greed, and hiding behind legaleeze and lawyerly technicalities. Frank's in-your-face assessment of the situation gives new ideas as to why the aforementioned Governor might have passed him by for the temporary Senate slot. It would appear there may be more of a story to their relationship than has been seen in the public eye. Meanwhile, Coakley demonstrates an admirable willingness to take on the fight for the average citizen of the Commonwealth, despite regulatory boards that appear to be hiding behind the couch in the basement and lack of support from other key players.
To Northeast Utilities: please get it over with, and make a voluntary disclosure to stop these preening politicians from turning this into a PR nightmare for you. Yes, I know you followed all the laws and rules, but... To the administration: since you now want to investigate the merger to "protect the ratepayers", you might want to look into how the merger was held up until the companies agreed to the administration's demand that they buy electricity from the Cape Wind boondoggle, a demand that will haunt consumers and businesses for the next 20 years as we end up "spending huge amounts" for overpriced, unreliable electricity.
SuperBoB thank you for reminding everyone it was owing to pressure by Deval, or perhaps more accurately - outright extortion forcing the new entity to agree to buy Cape Wind Powerat three times the going price in order to get approval for the merger. And if memory serves, Coakley was a party to those discussions. Maybe this is another instance where we have to wait until Carmen Ortiz steps in to expose the corruption.
I'd be out picketing if it didn't involve Cape Wind electricity. Time to move forward with 21st century energy sources, before Plum Island turns into Plum Atoll.
This action, or lack of action, by Mass. DPU and Deval Patrick is simply indefensible. The merger was predicated on complete transparency of the involved finances. Northeast Utilities is reneging and it's hard to understand why. Something doesn't smell right! Once again, I am deeply disappointed by Deval Patrick. His moral development is quite questionable, IMO, lacking an elementary sense of fairness, the need for transparency, and a basic sense of "equal treatment under law". I no longer feel he is qualified to hold public office. He is part of the problem as he attempts to protect the 1% against the rest of us. He ought to have several dinners with Barney Frank and try to learn how most of us live in this finacially-troubled real world, instead of his protected cocoon.
It looks to me that Martha is running for Governor next year and maybe a political contribution. Who can forget how the governor held up the merger to make northeast agree to support the windmills down on Nanucket. Who was the beneficiary? National Grid?
It seems Marsha does have a backbone.....unfortunately, it only stiffens up when the potential wrong doer isn't a Democrat politician...
I'm disliking our governor more and more. He clearly is an example of enforcing the greed of the 1%
Madam Atty General is tilting at windmills. Sancho Panza did it better and was able to sing too.
Why doesn't this story make, or ask about, the connection between Governor Patrick thrice refusing to say anything substantive about Tom May's platinum parachute, and Tom May's agreeing to use billions of dollars in ratepayer money to prop up Governor Patrick's people's pet green-energy obsession, Cape Wind? It sure looks and smells like a deal's a deal: You agreed to bail out this insanely overpriced greendoggle that will ruin Nantucket Sound forever, so I am not going to put any of my weight behind the quest to find out how much Massachusetts electric ratepayers paid Tom May for "rewarding himself" by engineering the NSTAR-Northeast Utility merger. Mass. DPU is totally conflicted and compromised here, too, given how heavily they put their thumb on the scale to make Cape Wind power deals with NSTAR and National Grid happen.
Good luck to accountants and prosecutors and journalists trying to figure out what Tom May grabbed from next year's NU proxy. In his late years at NStar, he's been paying himself massive stock options and stock holdings. Whatever the NST-to-NU stock conversion rate was, unless we see or AG Coakley subpoenas the numbers from this quarter, we probably will never be able to back-calculate from his NU holdings what he took out of the company in pure straight cash that YOU are paying for every time you run the dishwasher.
I hope the Globe Spotlight Team will get on this one. Going back to who threatened whom with what to make the utilities buy Cape Wind power, and how the NSTAR-NU merger went down and whom it enriched, there's a rich, sordid tale to unsnarl here.
great job here. how do these so called non profits and protected monopolies get away with thisnonsense...million dollar salaries are not justified and an insult to us all
The deal Deval brokered with Evergreen Solar went swimingly so why not try it again with Cape Wind? As Senator Blumenthal said, "the company must be pretty worried about what consumers will think of the compensation." Although we won't know for sure until we're able to see filings but you have to assume May got a huge pay package which, coupled with high prices from Cape Wind, means greater expense to we consumers. I respect the fact that he champions new energy sources but, based on past history, I have no confidence in his ability to broker a deal that's in the best interests the taxpayers.
As JEM007 posted, Deval "needs to learn how most of us live in this financially-troubled real world." He courts and protects the 1%, cares deeply for inmates and illegal aliens, but doesn't seem to care much for the middle class who pay taxes and continue to struggle.
Deval looks like he is forgetting goodness and apple pie. Ms Coakley looks like she has nothing bettter to do,