At least the recession has purged corporate America of “gross excesses in executive compensation,” said Douglas McIntyre in DailyFinance.com. Or maybe not. Consider the following gems found in recent corporate proxy statements: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made $39 million last year, to the dismay of many shareholders in the struggling Web portal. That sum included $110,000 to pay the attorneys who negotiated her pay. Then there���s Delta Airlines, which paid CEO Richard Anderson $772,000 to bail him out of an underwater mortgage when he moved from Minneapolis to Atlanta last year. But Occidental Petroleum chief Ray Irani, whose lavish pay is a perennial source of shareholder ire, may take the cake. His 2009 compensation of $31.4 million included $391,000 for advice on how to invest all that money.
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