Word: treeing
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Many U.S. executives savored fat bonuses last month after their companies pulled in record sales and profits. But not Lawrence Coss, the chief executive officer of mobile-home lender Green Tree Financial, who in 1996 surprisingly topped the list of highest-paid corporate leaders--overshadowing such titans as the Travelers Group's Sanford Weill and Walt Disney's Michael Eisner. Whoops! To his dismay, Coss may have to repay $40 million of the $102 million bonus he received that year because Green Tree now concedes that accounting errors led it to overstate profits. Says the taciturn and reclusive Coss...
...also hardly uncommon in an industry that had been white hot until recently. As a so-called sub-prime lender, Green Tree makes high-interest loans to people with damaged credit. With dozens of rivals streaming into the field, however, profits and stock prices have been heading south faster than a recreational vehicle. Just last week the Money Store, for which Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer delivers commercials, reportedly put itself up for sale after recording a dizzying slump in profits. Two other big lenders--Aames Financial and Cityscape Financial--are seeking buyers as well...
...shareholders have suffered more than those of Green Tree, which was founded in 1975 in St. Paul, Minn., and has long been an industry leader. Hapless Green Tree investors have seen their stock sink from $50 a share last October to just $19 before it rebounded a bit to close at $24 last week. Coss, 59, a former used-car salesman who sports jeans and cowboy boots off the job, has seen the value of his own shares fall from $330 million to $145 million. Such misery has plenty of company: more than 20 Green Tree competitors have lost anywhere...
Just ask Green Tree, where many shareholders remain bitter about the profit revision, which included a $190 million write-down for the fourth quarter of 1997. Angry investors have filed at least a dozen lawsuits, some charging that Green Tree used improperly "aggressive" accounting methods to tot up profits and thereby boost Coss's personal pay--a charge the company denies. Coss did enjoy a formula that accorded him a salary of $400,000 plus 2.5% of the company's pretax profits. Half the compensation was in cash, the other half in the form of Green Tree stock that Coss...
...that convinced me stairs were a necessity. My friends and I were trying to make the last T after the late movie and they convinced me that crawling hands and knees up the hill would save more time than running all the way around. Holding on to a pine tree for dear life, at midnight on a windy January night, I wanted a staircase more than at any other time in my life...