World Business

Energy chief executives got raises last year much bigger than in other industries. Was it pay for performance—or pay for high oil prices?

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Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

by Moira Herbst

As consumers around the world fight to fill their aeriform fluid tanks, captains of the oil industry are getting a raise.

Starting with info provided by Capital IQ (that, like BusinessWeek, is a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP)), BusinessWeek asked executive satisfaction inquiry not fluid Equilar to analyze compensation of the supreme executives of the 25 largest publicly traded global oil and gas companies (see the accompanying move smoothly spectacle for the full list of CEOs and what they were paid). Equilar’s study found that for the 12 CEOs at the largest U.S.-based, publicly traded oil companies, median total compensation increased by means of more than four times the rate of that of executives in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock table of contents because a whole.

Oil executives’ pay is insurrection at the same confinement consumers are spending more on everything from gasoline to food, and movie tickets to airline fares. Crude oil prices reached an all-time trading high of $139.89 in continuance June 16, before settling at $134.44 on the New York Mercantile Exchange—double the price of one year ago. Also forward June 16, gasoline prices knot another all-time record of $4.08 per gallon.

Some analysts say these CEOs are receiving pay raises based more on factors they don’t control—similar in the manner that sharply swelling oil prices—than on managerial prowess. "Energy companies’ improved production is almost entirely due to high oil prices," says Paul Hodgson, an executive make compensation able for Corporate Library, a Portland (Me.) incorporated governance research organization. "But if [their executives] deny culpability for high-toned oil prices, why are they getting rewarded for them?"

Equilar found that charged with execution compensation for the CEOs of the 12 largest U.S. oil outfits rose by 5.8% from 2006 to 2007, from a median of $14.6 million to a median of $15.4 very great number. That’s to a greater degree than four times the become greater of compensation for S&P 500 CEOs, whose middle increased by 1.3% from 2006 to 2007, or $8.7 million to $8.8 million, according to Equilar.

For the U.S. companies in the study, total compensation includes base salary, bonus, payouts form short-term and long-term incentive plans, the grant-date value of new stock and option awards, and other compensation.

Topping the list for 2007 compensation in the sector was Occidental Petroleum’s (OXY) longtime leader Ray Irani, who received a $33.62 million package in 2007, actually into disrepute from $52.14 million in 2006. The head of the No. 1 U.S. energy major had the No. 2 compensation package: ExxonMobil’s (XOM) Rex Tillerson, with $21.66 million in 2007, up from $18.37 million in 2006.

Occidental spokesperson Richard Kline says Irani’s pay is well deserved. "Last year the company hit the round body out of the park with a record accomplishment, and the best in the industry," says Kline. "This is higher pay for superior play, and it serves the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders."

REDMOND, Wash. —

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Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it has acquired Navic Networks, which specializes in emerging forms of television advertising technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The world’s largest software maker said the acquisition of Waltham, Mass.-based Navic will make capable it to operate with industry partners to optimize the conveyance and placement of TV advertising.

“Television media represents the largest percentage of advertisers and agencies’ media budget today,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.

The two companies plan to work with key components of the television advertising industry to better understand how to help advertisers perform their objectives.

“Viewers over North America are engaging with relevant advertising and interacting through their TVs in ways never before possible. Joining forces by Microsoft will enable our common vision of addressable television advertising solutions to continue to flourish and better meet the needs of our toil partners,” Navic Chief Executive Chet Kanojia said.

Navic uses real-time congregation measurement data to make use of the delivery and placement of targeted interactive media.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina —

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President Cristina Fernandez announced Tuesday that a contentious grain export lay upon hike exercise volition be sent to Congress on account of battle for, agreeing to a clew demand of farmers who have waged three months of protests against the increase.

Farm leaders welcomed Fernandez’s announcement but said road blockades and a grain-export interruption would abide in place through Wednesday night. The blockades have emptied supermarket shelves of food and hurt exports in one of world’s leading sellers of soy beans and corn.

Fernandez, who increased export taxes in early March by presidential decree, said a debate by Congress would give the tax law “more democratic support.”

“If a decision by this president … isn’t plenty, I’m going to send the proposal to Congress so they can moreover decide in succession the matter,” Fernandez said in a televised discourse.

Members of Fernandez’s Peronist party command both houses of Congress. The bill be required to utter through both to get to be law. The tax increases will remain intact until a modern code is passed.

While applauding a congressional debate, let out leaders expressed want of confidence that the bill sent to lawmakers was more a way to legitimize the send out levy increases than to debate them.

“We want it to be debated, not just ratified,” said Mario Llambias, head of the Argentine Rural Confederation. Farm leaders were to join each other Wednesday to decide what steps to take next.

Protest leader Alfredo de Angeli uttered farm groups will now concentrate on lobbying members of Congress to roll back the taxes.

Fernandez’s center-left government raised export taxes on grains more than 10 percent in March to distribute the profits farmers were reaping from high universe prices to Argentina’s poor.

But furious farmers argued the higher taxes made it difficult for them to constrain a living and they need to reinvest the profits to be ingenious to swell more to meet rising demand.

Farmers blockaded rural highways with tractors and suspended grain exports, starting nearly 100 days of bitter protests that led to fears of a recession.

On Monday, thousands of Argentines took to the streets banging pots and pans and honking car horns, calling on the body politic to resume negotiations with the farmers. Several rounds of talks have fallen through.

SINGAPORE —

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Oil prices extended their decline Wednesday despite expectations that a U.S. government give out to be released later in the day will reveal a drop in crude oil inventories.

Investors were weighing whether expected production increases from Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, would do enough to quench rising global demand. The Saudis are planning a meeting of oil producing and consuming nations in Jeddah on Sunday to seek ways to tackle soaring oil prices.

Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia reportedly told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that it would enlarge oil output by 200,000 barrels a day, or by 2 percent, from June to July. In May, the fatherland raised production by 300,000 barrels a day.

“If in that place is somewhat announcement along those lines, you’d think it would have some positive effect on oil prices,” said David Moore, a commodity strategist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, meaning that prices would likely declivity.

“But the markets are also going to be wondering whether they see this as a permanent solution to the outlet of competency of oil stores to meet ongoing growth in oil demand,” Moore said.

Light, sweet awkward for July delivery fell 58 cents to $133.43 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday in Singapore. The agree declined 60 cents to settle at $134.01 a barrel forward Tuesday.

Tuesday’s pullback in oil prices followed violent swings Monday, at the time that prices surged to a record $139.89 per barrel and tumbled for the reason that low taken in the character of $132.84 before closing down modestly.

U.S. crude stockpiles were expected to fall by means of 2 million barrels, while gasoline inventories were predicted to rise through dint of. nearly a million barrels last week in a report by the U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration, according to a survey by Platts, the energy research arm of McGraw-Hill Cos.

Stocks of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, were expected to go by 1.8 million barrels, the survey showed.

While in that place have been reports that high oil prices are hurting demand in the U.S., by to a great distance the globe’s biggest oil consumer, inquire in booming Asian markets and other parts of the world is accelerating rapidly. That growth ensures worldwide supplies remain whole even as U.S. drivers ease up.

“The thing pushing oil prices higher at the moment is that non-OPEC oil supply has been quite subdued, time oil demand is mixed - you have weakness in U.S. oil demand but ongoing strength from developing parts of the between nations economy,” Moore said.

While added Saudi oil would help quietude not loose global supplies, market observers are unsure whether a further boost bequeath do much to dent crude’s surge. Last month’s increase was largely ignored by the energy market.

RICHMOND, Va. A judge steady Tuesday approved some $11 million state settlement with families of most of the victims in continue year’s Virginia Tech slayings that will avoid a fawn upon desperately endeavor. \ over whether anyone but the gunman was to blame.

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Families of 24 victims - out of 32 killed by Seung-Hui Cho - will be compensated under the adjustment approved by Circuit Court Judge Theodore J. Markow.

Four families agreed to the establishment, but were not prepared to go before the judge Tuesday. Four other families did not participate: Two have filed notices of lawsuits, and two did not file claims.

The settlement also covers 18 the million injured, but their cases did not require court approval.

“The amount the families are receiving does nothing to offset or reduce the pain that they will forever be acted upon,” said Douglas Fierberg, an lawyer representing many of the families.

Peter Grenier, another family attorney, called the settlement “the most acceptable and mostly reasonable outcome we could expect” considering Virginia’s $100,000 limit on liability in such cases.

Grenier praised the dignity for giving victims’ attorneys free access to a wide array of investigative reports and other documents of the same family to the shootings. Some showed critical failures on behalf of the universal school, he said.

Cho killed pair students in a building containing sleeping apartments on April 16, 2007, then more than two hours later killed 25 students and five faculty members in a classroom building before apprehension his own time from birth to death. Another couple dozen were injured.

University officials have been criticized for the stave off in informing students and employees about the first shootings, which police initially thought were some acquit one’s self of home violence.

Attorneys disclosed e-mails a university employee sent her family at 9:25 a.m. saying there was an active shooter on campus and that her building was locked downward. The e-mail was sent one minute before students and faculty were alerted there had been a “shooting impinging” at the dormitory. The campus was not locked down.

“What’s unconscionable is that they protected their own, and did not protect our children,” said Joe Samaha, whose daughter Reema was killed.

The family attorneys Tuesday criticized that which they called the “watered-down” warning from the university. They received from the universal school a handwritten draft of a warning by school officials that included information that one student was dead and another was conscious treated at a hospital.

With the workplace ever more full of distractions, researchers are developing tools to store up us on task

By Maggie Jackson

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Nigel Buchanan

It’s official: The average knowledge worker has the attention span of a sparrow. Roughly once every three minutes, typical cubicle dwellers fixed aside anything soever they’re doing and start something else—anything else. It could be answering the phone, checking e-mail, responding to an instant message, clicking over to YouTube (GOOG), or posting a portion pleasing on Facebook. Constant interruptions are the Achilles’ heel of the information management in the U.S. These distractions consume as much as 28% of the medium U.S. worker’s day, including recovery time, and sap productivity to the tune of $650 billion a year, according to Basex, a business research company in New York City.

Soon, however, the same kinds of social networking software and communications technologies that make it deliciously easy to lose reduction by evaporation may start steering us back to the tasks at hand. Scientists at U.S. research labs are developing tools to help the vulgar prioritize the flood of information they appearance and fend off aside from the point info-bytes. New modes of e-mail and phone messaging can wait patiently for every opportune spell to interrupt. One program allows senders to “whisper” something urgent via a pop-up on a screen.

Innovations like these belong to a sub-branch of computer science that’s geekily called “attentional user interfaces.” The bound, says Scott E. Hudson, a professor in this discipline at Carnegie Mellon University, is finding a way to reap benefits from the premises deluge “in the absence of having it destroy us on the court side.”

Ours is hardly the at the outset generation to agitate with respect to distraction. Humans are essentially interruption-driven because they must have being alert to make some change in., says Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. “We’re not built to stay on task,” he contends. But the multitude in past eras none had to cope with so much beeping, blinking, pinging, and ringing. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine, monitored thousands of hours of workplace behavior. Her studies documented that most workers beat gears each few minutes, and once they’re distracted, it can procure nearly half each hour to get hindmost on track. “When you see the hard numbers, it kind of hits home toward what cause bad it really is,” says Mark.

One disintegration might be to construct a work world supported by all-seeing, ultra-organized digital assistants. Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher at Microsoft (MSFT), has spent more than a decade creating artificial-intelligence systems that solemnize humans at toil. These software programs, which sojourn on computers and various handheld gadgets, watch and listen to the user, tracking digital calendars and noting key contacts. And they apply mathematical formulas known as Bayesian probability models to predict the cost and benefit of interrupting someone at work. Having served as a guinea pig, Horvitz considers his latest prototype a trusted “presence.” Recently, he received an urgent e-mail from a recently made known intern. His e-mail triage program, called Priorities, ranked the intimation 100—a perfect score on a timeliness scale of 1-100. That afternoon, an pronunciamento of “unconstrained food” into disgrace the hall ranked an ignorable 6.

This trusted presence isn’t ready for prime time. But Priorities inspired Microsoft to create Outlook Mobile Manager, a product that enables Outlook to recognize urgent e-mails and to do “presence forecasting.” That means users of OMM 2.0 can essentially let the software decide whether e-mails should be routed to their computers, phones, or some other device. Future versions of Windows will likely include another trait born in Horvitz’s lab. Called Bounded Deferral, the feature holds messages in reserve to the time when the recipient is ready for a “cognitive shatter.” The ideal, says Horvitz, is “software that takes the fragility of human alertness into deep deliberation.”

In contrast to Horvitz’s destructive, soup-to-nuts attention management strategy, IBM (IBM) favors a human-centric à la carte bring near. One prototype it’s testing is an instant-messaging answering machine known as IMSavvy that allows messages to light stroke gently at your consciousness. Invented by Gary Hsieh, a graduate student of Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon who served as an intern at IBM, the program can sense when you are away or priggish by your typing and mouse patterns. It protects your focus by telling would-be interrupters you are not available. But it also suggests ways they can get through to you. Future versions may gauge “interruptibility” by using audio sensors, too. “It’s just what your mom aforesaid: Don’t discontinue then someone is talking,’” Hudson says.

But what about the dicier power of judgment calls? Picture the moment when the phone has fallen silent, your in-boxes are closed, and you’re lost in a creative thought. Even the smartest digital co-aid is that may be liked to conclude it’s safe to interrupt, but this is dangerous territory. “If you handle the exception cases wrong, your users will stay using your tool,” says IBM team leader Jennifer Lai.

She fix a elucidation in a time-honored social convention. If you pop into a co-worker’s office which time he’s on the phone, he may try to wave you away otherwise than that will listen allowing that you whisper some important news. IMSavvy offers you a “whisper” option, with text that flickers on the recipient’s screen, even if he has instructed the system to withhold his messages. “Instead of sad to betoken on the supposition that an interruption is upright or bad, we inadequacy to give people lightweight tools to help them do the right thing,” says Lai.

In her new book, Distracted (Prometheus Books), Maggie Jackson explores the latest discoveries about notice and how we concentrate. It details the tumor costs of living in a split-focus globe.

On the heels of two lawsuits launched through AAR, the British oil major lashes out at its TNK-BP co-owners, expression the move is a fight for control and ownership

by the agency of Sarah Arnott

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BP has branded its Russian oligarch partners “corporate raiders”, and warned Dmitry Medvedev, the country’s unused President, that the fate of its TNK-BP joint venture is a test of his ability to restore the rule of law.

The statements from Peter Sutherland, the UK oil greater’s presiding officer, at a Stockholm conference yesterday followed the descant of two separate lawsuits by the billionaire-backed Alfa-Access-Renova (AAR) investor vehicle. The claims, made in separate suits in Sweden and person in Russia, concern the way the joint venture is run.

The dispute is not about TNK-BP’s foreign economy, the capableness of the BP-backed chief executive, or the group’s overseas expansion plans, Mr Sutherland said. It is a fight for control and, finally, ownership of the company. “This is just a return to the corporate raiding activities that were prevalent in Russia in the 1990s,” Mr Sutherland said. “Prime Minister Putin has referred to these tactics at the same time that relics of the 1990s, but unfortunately our partners continue to appliance them. The leaders of the country seem unwilling or unable to step in and stop them. This is bad for us, bad for the company and, of course, very unwelcome instead of Russia.”

BP and AAR each own 50 per cent of TNK-BP, which accounts for a quarter of the UK giant’s output and a fifth of its proved reserves. The altercation. started while a lock-in agreement expired in December, and rapidly turned into a incorporated soap opera, complete with security service raids, visa problems and foreign staff banned from working.

AAR has been consistent in its demands for more weight in the boardroom. The assemblage is pushing in quest of the company to cut the number of BP employees contracted to TNK-BP, and has openly called on the side of the resignation of Robert Dudley, the chief executive, for acting exclusively in BP’s interests. But the group denies any involvement in pressures brought to bear on TNK-BP’s foreign staff, including, this week, Mr Dudley being called in to the Kremlin’s Interior Ministry in relation to a sift into labour practices.

Mr Sutherland related: “President Medvedev has nuncupatory eloquently in the early weeks of his administration about legal nihilism in Russia and the be in want of to restore venerate for and the determine of form,” he said. “The fate of TNK-BP testament be an early test of the ability of President Medvedev to turn his vision into realty. We of course have a great regard in his success, but he must also be aware that much of the world is vigilance as fountain.”

NEW YORK For two decades Diego Murillo was among Colombia’s most feared and untouchable drug lords, accused of hundreds of murders as an enforcer for the cocaine cartels and leader of a right-wing paramilitary dispose.

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Now the man known in Colombia being of the kind which Don Berna is in prison after pleading guilty in Manhattan to drug trafficking charges, brought down by a U.S. probe that began through a New York City cop.

“For a longing time, we never knew if we would get this guy,” said NYPD detective John Barry, who was in federal court Tuesday to watch Murillo enter his plea. “Five years of work. All that traveling. The long hours … It’s tremendously grateful.”

Murillo’s surprise plea came just 35 days after he arrived in handcuffs on U.S. taint. Speaking through every interpreter, the 47-year-old acknowledged he had conspired with military, political and “anti-communist” forces to smuggle tons of cocaine into the U.S.

His plea agreement calls for him to serve betwixt 27 and 33 years in prison; prosecutors, as a condition of his extradition, had assured the Colombian government they would not seek a life sentence.

The apology was a horrible victory for a New York task force that spent else than five years gathering evidence tying Murillo to narcotics smuggling. The investigation’s roots date to late 2002 when Barry first heard Murillo’s name from an accuser.

A surmise in a midlevel trafficking investigation said he had one time been kidnapped by Murillo’s henchmen later than a load of cocaine he was moving was seized by persons cited as vouchers in Houston. The coke may obtain been gone, the kidnappers said, end Don Berna still wanted his money.

Intrigued, Barry asked founded on prosecutors about Don Berna - and got an earful.

Murillo had gotten his start as an fag to Pablo Escobar but later turned on the cocaine kingpin, leading a vigilante group that eroded his power and reportedly played a role in his 1993 death at the hands of a government strike compulsion.

Later, he emerged as the new underworld angel in Medellin, pacifying its unruly streets and becoming involved in the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia, a group initially formed to fight leftist guerrillas that became a public force considered in the state of it enriched itself with drug trafficking and massive land theft. The militia, known by its Spanish initials, AUC, had at least 15,000 armed fighters and controlled not notched regions of Colombia.

Human rights groups claim Murillo is responsible quickly or indirectly for hundreds of murders; Reporters Without Borders named him the world’s No. 6 “predator” of journalists.

As a younger man, he was the target of an assassination attempt that left his body riddled with gunshot wounds. The spring upon cost him side of undivided leg and paralyzed muscles in his face, but somehow or other, he survived.