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View Say on Pay press release

New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., on behalf of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS), today announced that the Pension Fund has resubmitted shareholder proposals with Blockbuster, Inc. and The Home Depot that would give shareholders an advisory vote on executive pay.

“News reports of inflated executive salaries and compensation packages have been shocking investors,” Thompson said. “NYCERS has taken action by calling for a say on executive pay. NYCERS’ proposals have received majority votes demonstrating that investors agree that reform is necessary on this issue.”

The proposals call on the companies’ Boards of Directors to adopt a policy that would give shareholders a non-binding advisory vote, at the companies’ annual meetings, on the compensation of named executive officers.

“Investors are increasingly concerned about mushrooming executive compensation which sometimes appears to be insufficiently aligned with the creation of shareholder value,” the shareholder resolution reads. “We believe that existing corporate governance arrangements…do not provide stockholders with enough mechanisms for providing input to boards on senior executive compensation.”

NYCERS filed similar proposals with The Home Depot and Blockbuster last year. The proposal received 57% of the votes cast at Blockbuster’s 2007 annual meeting, marking the second time this proposal had received a majority vote in the United States. Shortly after the 2007 annual meeting, Comptroller Thompson wrote to Blockbuster asking how the company intended to respond to the majority vote.  The company responded, after the Fund re-filed the resolution for 2008, that it was seeking to better align pay with performance, and requested that the proposal be withdrawn.  The Fund refused, advocating the view that the policy should be embraced as a fundamental principle of good corporate governance. The proposal received 43% of the votes cast at The Home Depot’s 2007 annual meeting.

Last year, NYCERS also filed the proposal with Par Pharmaceuticals, which received a 56.8% majority vote at the company’s 2007 annual meeting. As a result of that majority vote, Par Pharmaceuticals agreed to implement the proposal beginning in 2009.

NYCERS holds 157,000 shares in Blockbuster, Inc., with a market value of $532,230 and 1,990,855 shares in The Home Depot, with a market value of $58,551,045.

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