Tony O'Reilly has never had the greatest relationship with the Wall Street financial media, and has regularly taken umbrage when the size of his pay packet is contrasted with the sort of return he has generated for Heinz shareholders.
Only last year, the Heinz PR machine was cranked into full gear when Business Week International launched a scathing attack on Dr O'Reilly's management of Heinz and what it felt was a cosy club of malleable directors on the Heinz board. The reaction from Pittsburgh was one of outrage with Heinz producing reams of figures to show that it was producing a better performance that most of its peers.
Now the bible of The Street, the Wall Street Journal, has taken a potshot at the Heinz chairman and former chief executive, and taken a close look at what the Journal describes as "his goodies" the series of lucrative share options Dr O'Reilly received from Heinz over the past 10 years.
Between 1988 and 1990, he got options of 5.25 million shares. In 1990, he landed a "megagrant" of four million options and exercised them in 1995 for a pre-tax profit of $61.5 million (£43.9 million).
The next year, he collected another 750,000 options and as of April 1997, he held options valued at $29.1 million. Last December, he exercised 1.13 million options for a pre-tax gain of nearly $35 million.
And what about Heinz shareholders? "Meanwhile, Heinz shareholders were hardly feasting. From fiscal 1993 to 1997, their returns lagged behind those of stocks in the S&P 500 Index," says the Journal.
The rationale for the generosity from Heinz to its chairman? "Heinz has said it feared losing him during the late 1980s, when he had 57 varieties of flirtation with investment banks and buyout firms." The company says Dr O'Reilly's recent grants were intended "to align his interests with those of shareholders", notes the Journal.
