A Message to the Salary & Organization CommitteeHi All,
Perhaps someone will pass this message onto this gang...
John Honderich, Chair
Linda Hughes
Dorothy Strachan
Martin Thall
The objectives of the Executive Compensation Program –
Torstar’s compensation program is designed to attract, motivate, reward and retain qualified executives.
(Draw your own conclusions based on the performance of the business over the past year. The Chief Revenue Officer decamped to join CBC of all places, the CEO has never been a CEO of any company and wouldn’t be hired as a CEO of any other public company, the CFO is incompetent and would not get another CFO job anywhere in Canada.)
The objectives are to: pay for performance by rewarding the achievement of individual performance as well as annual and long-term financial results and strategic objectives and ultimately to align the interests of our executives with our shareholders by rewarding performance that increases shareholder value.
(Has anyone seen any evidence of performance that has increased shareholder value? Quarter after quarter the results have been a disappointment and there is no evidence of any improvement in performance. I would ask you to objectively review the financial and strategic objectives and strip away the nonsense employed to distract you from the unvarnished facts. The Star paywall is a disaster, StarMetro is a failure, the deal with Postmedia was an executional train wreck, VertigoScope is a continuing disappointment that is piling on debt while achieving marginal revenue growth. I could go on but the actual financial results speak for themselves as the company shrinks with every passing day.)
We use variable compensation programs that link compensation to …the overall performance of Torstar.
(A year ago, the share price was an embarrassing $1.60. Today it is trading at $.77 representing a 52% decline. This is the market speaking to the performance of your executives and the business and there is a linkage.)
Last year you paid Boynton $2.3 million for 9 months "work" and DeMarchi $1.2 million. The base salaries of $750,000 for Boynton and $427,000 for DeMarchi are obscene based on their performance. Morale throughout the businesses is at an all-time low as chaos reigns. You will be told otherwise by Boynton and DeMarchi, but the reality is there is absolutely no confidence in the leadership of the company.
To layer on huge bonuses while the business is in a death spiral will signal to everyone that the Board is even more complicit in destroying shareholder value than the current share price reflects.
I remain,
A Concerned B Shareholder