BofA said to reduce CEO Moynihan’s pay 7.1% to $13M

NEW YORK – Bank of America Corp. cut CEO Brian T. Moynihan’s pay 7.1 percent for last year to $13 million after profit dropped by more than half.

Moynihan got $11.5 million in stock grants, the company said Tuesday in a regulatory filing. The board left his salary unchanged at $1.5 million and he received no cash bonus, a person with knowledge of the decisions said, asking not to be identified because the figures weren’t announced.

Moynihan, 55, spent the year cutting expenses and cleaning up some of the bank’s biggest legal disputes. Profit slid 58 percent to $4.8 billion last year as settlements tied to mortgage claims and foreign-exchange manipulation probes fueled two quarterly losses. In August, the company reached a record $16.7 billion deal to end probes into mortgage-bond sales.

The board also reduced equity awards for two of Moynihan’s deputies, Chief Operating Officer Thomas K. Montag and Chief Financial Officer Bruce Thompson, according to filings Tuesday. Stock comprised the largest portion of their packages a year ago. The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank hasn’t yet disclosed their salaries and cash bonuses for 2014.

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Lozano’s oversight

The board’s compensation committee is led by Monica C. Lozano, chairman of U.S. Hispanic Media Inc., a Spanish-language publisher. Payouts for Moynihan, who was named chairman in October, and other senior leaders may ultimately change because some awards are in restricted stock linked to the firm’s future performance.

Bank of America’s shares rose 15 percent last year, beating the 13 percent advance for the 85-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index.

Figures disclosed so far suggest Moynihan will continue to be out-earned by Montag, who runs the firm’s investment-banking and trading businesses. Montag has been paid more than his boss for four straight years, receiving $15.5 million a year ago.

There was no raise last month for JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, whose pay had almost doubled to $20 million a year earlier. Instead, the board included a $7.4 million cash bonus in his package, his first such reward since 2011.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. also boosted the cash portion of Chairman and CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein’s bonus. That component, $7.33 million, accounted for a third of the bonus in his $24 million package this time, up from 30 percent. The bank hasn’t yet said whether he’s getting a long-term incentive that amounted to $6 million last year.

Gaining power

Morgan Stanley’s board included a $4.44 million stock bonus in James Gorman’s package for last year, a 13 percent cut as the firm gives employees a greater portion of their pay in cash. The bank will disclose his cash bonus and long-term incentives later this year.

Moynihan, an Ohio-born lawyer who rose through the ranks at FleetBoston Financial Corp. before Bank of America bought it, outlasted other executives in late 2009 as talks fell apart with CEO candidates from firms including Bank of New York Mellon Corp. He gained the chairman title after spending much of his time as CEO, and more than $70 billion, dealing with the fallout from his predecessor’s acquisitions of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Countrywide Financial Corp. Bank of America is now the nation’s second-biggest bank by assets.

Moynihan won Federal Reserve approval in August to boost the company’s dividend to 5 cents a share, from the token 1-cent payout it had in place since 2009. A proposed increase earlier last year was postponed because the lender mistakenly inflated capital levels by $4 billion.

Montag got $7.8 million in stock for 2014, compared with $8.7 million for the previous year. Thompson got $5.9 million, down from $6.7 million in 2013. Their total pay, which has included cash bonuses in the past, typically isn’t disclosed until an annual proxy filing later this year.

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