Figuring out Mozilo's pay

Good luck. If you're looking at the summary compensation table for Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, his total compensation is a mere $10.8 million, down 70 percent from a year earlier. That's what the WSJ is reporting. Thing is, the relatively modest payout does not include the $121.5 million that Mozilo realized from exercising stock options (many of them before the mortgage company's big stock plunge). The options were granted over the years and then exercised and sold under a pre-arranged trading plan that Mozilo has been defending. (I've always found it preferable to base compensation on what the executive actually took home in a year as opposed to what he was being promised in options and such). Countrywide reported a loss of $704 million last year, its first full-year loss in more than three decades. Also in the filing: One of Mozilo's sons received $323,000 as a Countrywide branch manager and a son-in-law picked up $574,000 as a director of fixed-income products. I suspect we haven't heard the last of this. Here's the Reuters account, here's the WSJ account and here's the filing.