{"id":6162,"date":"2012-04-27T10:32:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-27T15:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/?p=6162"},"modified":"2012-05-01T09:42:15","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T14:42:15","slug":"chesapeakes-cowboy-ceo-and-an-annual-meeting-turned-corporate-rodeo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/2012\/04\/27\/chesapeakes-cowboy-ceo-and-an-annual-meeting-turned-corporate-rodeo\/","title":{"rendered":"Chesapeake’s ‘Cowboy’ CEO and an Annual Meeting -turned Corporate Rodeo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas Hawk \/ Flickr<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>

Weighing in on the recent tumult<\/a> at Chesapeake Energy, the New York Times<\/em> likens CEO Aubrey McClendon to a cowboy bracing for a bucking:<\/p>

From<\/a> the paper\u2019s Clifford Krauss:<\/p>\n

He became a billionaire as the company he co-founded aggressively outbid competitors for land leases and drilled highly productive wells in virtually every major shale gas field in the country \u2026 But Mr. McClendon also borrowed heavily, with loans currently of $846 million, to finance his participation in an unusual compensation plan that allowed him to invest alongside Chesapeake in every well that it drilled, sharing in both the profits and the expenses.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Cowboy or not, McClendon will have to face some bulls at the company\u2019s shareholder meeting on June 8, which insiders say is likely to be quite the corporate rodeo.<\/p>

<\/p>

McClendon is everything shareholder activists \u201clove to hate,\u201d says the Associated Press, reporting<\/a> about this year\u2019s anxiously anticipated annual meetings.<\/p>\n

In 2008, a year when the stock plummeted from about $39 to $16, Chesapeake paid McClendon $12 million for his personal collection of antique maps. (A shareholder lawsuit is now forcing him to buy them back.) That same year, Chesapeake paid $3.5 million to sponsor the NBA\u2019s Oklahoma City Thunder, of which McClendon owned almost 20 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>

On Thursday, Chesapeake said they were ending a controversial perk \u2014 the Founder Well Participation Program \u2014 which allowed McClendon to take a personal stake in every well the company drilled.<\/p>

The company\u2019s stock has been battered, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is informally investigating the program, which raised questions about potential conflicts of interest. And on Thursday, Standard & Poor\u2019s downgraded<\/a> Chesapeake\u2019s corporate credit rating over the fracas, which its analysts said \u201cunderscore shortcomings\u201d in the company\u2019s corporate governance.<\/p>

A third lawsuit was filed<\/a> against Chesapeake and McClendon on Thursday on behalf of shareholders over disclosures relating to the CEO perk, The Oklahoman<\/em> reports. The company is facing four shareholder proposals at their annual meeting, “including one about lobbying disclosures that the company tried to keep off the ballot,” the AP reports<\/a>.<\/p>

The Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to disclosure with this guy, there always seems to be something amiss, something in the picture that hasn\u2019t come out,\u201d said Mark Hanson, an energy stock analyst at Morningstar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weighing in on the recent tumult at Chesapeake Energy, the New York Times likens CEO Aubrey McClendon to a cowboy bracing for a bucking:From the paper\u2019s Clifford Krauss: He became a billionaire as the company he co-founded aggressively outbid competitors for land leases and drilled highly productive wells in virtually every major shale gas field […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":6165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[301],"tags":[360,275],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6169,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions\/6169"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/oklahoma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}