What Are a Senator and a Governor Doing on Chesapeake’s Board?
Two large shareholders of Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK) have managed to push out four of the company’s nine directors, as Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management overhauled the governance structure of the big energy firm. A fifth director is likely…
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Nickles is a fine example of how quickly Chesapeake added politicians to its board. He left the Senate in 2005 and became a director the same year. Keating became a director in 2003. He left the job as Oklahoma’s governor that year because he could not run again due to term limits.
Nickles serves as the chairman of the Nominating & Corporate Governance committee, the body that oversees, among other things, many of the activities of CEO Aubrey K. McClendon. Keating serves as chairman of the Compensation committee, which takes the lead in setting the pay for McClendon and other senior officers. Again, neither politician has any experience that would qualify him to serve in either job. Their roles are cronyism as its worst.
Nickles and Keating have been paid well for their services — certainly more than they received in their public office roles. Keating made $559,232 last year. Nickles made $569,341. That puts them at the high end of what directors at large publicly held American companies make.
No one needs look any further than Nickles and Keating to see why most of the Chesapeake board needed to be replaced.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.