Chesapeake CEO McClendon steps down after year of tumult

Let’s see, I’m thinking a golden parachute of about $60 million or so, and throw in a large amount of stock.
These high paid CEO’s always land on their feet, like cats.
These CEO’s know too many things about too many important people (including Wall Street brokerage firms, politicians, etc.), so the golden parachutes buy their silence when they have to quit or they get fired.

americanguy…McClendon founded the company. He and a partner built it from the ground up and it’s worth billions of dollars. A bit of an odd duck, but in the end even Carl Icahn says McClendon is right about the value of natural gas. This company may ultimately be worth trillions. So the $60M parachute is beginning to look a little lot like chump change to me. What McClendon has done is impressive. How about you? How many jobs and how much value have to created?

In my opionion McClendon is a visionary where his greed overcame his genius in exploration and natural gas infrastructure engineering. I think he pushed the envelope of law and “me first” arrogance with the low prices and media attention being his downfall. That is if you can define his golden parachute as a downfall. In the long run Chesapeake, if run right, will continue to be a large player in natural gas production.

@xyz2055

His salary was $110 million, not billions.
He is the co-founder, not founder of the company (the other person WAS the founder of the company).
He managed to give himself hundreds of millions at the stockholders’ expense.
He borrowed billions on the COMPANY wells.
He used employees to do over $3 million of work for him.
He invested in wells drilled by his company.
There are also questions about natural gas price manipulation and fixing.
And he and the company would be NOTHING without all those people and organizations that invested money in the company.
And this is your hero? You worship people like this?
Says a lot about you,doesn’t it?
As for what have I done, read the news article about me when it comes out, until then, none of your blanking business.
Yep, I don’t take garbage off attack trolls.

The people approving such a lavish package for this turkey should be the next ones investigated. They’re “farting with a walkman on” if they think its not obvious they are buying this jerk’s silence.

The scam is this. Fracked wells don’t maintain the same flow outputs that traditional wells maintain. Thus, they will have to be refracked. This cost will prevent the operators from making money unless prices rise to about double where they are. Sure there is plenty of gas, but just like fracked oil and tar sands, it is not cheap. The minions of the corporations (some trolling here) will try and convince everyone that it is pure genius, but as always, it is just greed. McClendon is getting out at the right time. If he were to delay, he might be here long enough for people to connect the dots.

americanguy…McClendon has yet to be convicted of a single crime. I said the COMPANY is worth billions (not his salary) and I also noted that he founded the company with a partner. He’s not my hero, but I hate reading comments by trolls like you that jump on innuendo. He and his partner built the largest natural gas company in America. What have you accomplished?

Kudos to Reuters for their excellent journalism in exposing this crook and Senator Nelson for his encouragement of investigators. Best of luck to the state of Michigan and the Department of Justice in their investigations. No matter whether he was a genius in building the company or just a glib talker in the right place at the right time, he is now clearly a crook. It is long overdue for a crooked CEO to do some serious jail time. If you want to honor his past achievements, he can do his time in a Club Fed rather than a real prison.

Disclosure: I have sold mineral leases to both Chesapeake and Encana. Unfortunately, none of these properties were in Michigan, so these deals are not currently being investigated. I hope that the federal investigations into antitrust violations by Chesapeake and Encana extend to other states.

@xyz: I live in Oklahoma and I am currently living in a home (3,500 s.f. house on 40 acres of land) that is owned by one of Aubrey McClendon’s pet projects. This pet project is called the Deep Fork Tree Farm. This tree farm has been open for more than a decade and has yet to turn a profit. It has yet to turn a profit because Aubrey appointed the kid who used to mow his lawn (who has no professional experience or formal education) to oversee the entire operation. This pet project has also harmed the livelihoods of thousands of people in the area. The tree farm is broke and therefore unable to pay a new employment candidate what he wants so they decided to offer him my house for free. These are the kinds of decisions Aubrey McClendon makes. People and the law do not matter to this man (especially people). I have been appraising real estate since I was 19 and I know that the house I live in should not be zoned as “agriculture” because it is a residence. It is zoned agriculture because McClendon paid the appraiser to zone it that way because it helps McClendon’s company avoid paying property taxes like everyone else. Aubrey McClendon doesn’t have a great reputation anywhere. He was named Most Reckless Businessman by Forbes and with good reason. He has created a culture of excess at the expense of the community and the Oklahoma economy. He hyper-inflated land value in this state and many others using borrowed money that his company eventually could not pay back. He has a FWP program that not only was the first of its kind; it blurred the lines of business and pleasure. He personally colluded with Encana to fix land prices in the northern U.S. (and literally left a paper trail with his name all over it). You speak of him so highly because of his “accomplishments”. Tom Ward is the other man you speak of and as of yesterday, three new lawsuits have been brought against Sandridge (Tom Ward’s company) for the very same questionable business practices that Chesapeake utilized. The Sandridge board wants Tom Ward to leave just like McClendon and speculators are stating that Sandridge will not be able to survive 2013. So what is this great accomplishment you speak of? It sounds to me like the same old corruption that we have been hearing about for thirty years. The Sinaloa cartel is successful too, should we be praising them as well? Should we be talking down to people who oppose the cartel because they did not build a cartel themselves? Do you even know how Aubrey McClendon and Tom Ward built this company? Let me give you a little information about how Chesapeake came to be. Oil and Gas used to be a gentleman’s game. It used to be frowned upon to steal from your neighbor, but because a small group of people changed the rules it is now a requirement. If you are familiar with Oklahoma oil and gas law you know that in order for someone to drill in an area, the entire square mile that drill site sits on has to be leased. Oklahoma law allows drilling to proceed if 51% of that square mile is leased. The remaining 49% is placed in an escrow account held by the state. This is called “pooling”. So if the site produces, the 51% that are leased will get their interest directly and the remaining 49% interest goes into the escrow account. So what happens if one of those people in the 49% finds out about their land be in the drilling section? They will file the necessary paperwork and claim their part of the 49%. Aubrey came from an oil family. His family was drilling here in Oklahoma so Aubrey got the bright idea to go find those people who owned the land in that 49% and leased them (they didn’t know their land was already pooled and profiting from the production of the drill site). That meant he was able to collect the money from the escrow account instead of the land owner. This is called “Chasing poolings” which is not illegal, but is highly frowned upon in the industry. So basically, Aubrey and Tom ripped off Aubrey’s family and those owners in the pool to get rich. This is why many people in this country feel that in order to be successful and wealthy you must be a liar and a thief (I’m not saying this is true, but it is a belief held by many people based on sufficient evidence). This is the same reason the culture of business has assimilated to a culture of war. These companies do not give one crap about you, me, the community, the state, or the country. They want money for them and theirs and if you aren’t giving it to them they will find or create a legal way to take it from you. What a great thing to stand up for and be proud of!

americanguy-the golden parachute is per his employment agreement. It’s what you call “hedging your bets,” and these dirtbags are experts. That way, no matter what they do or don’t do – regardless of their success, failure or inability to pull off the theft of enough money to run a small country without being caught – they get to waltz off into the sunset after raping people for their land, raping the land, raping their shareholders and employees and raping the rest of us through an evern further depressed economy. Why the shareholders agree to this bs is beyond me. I guess they’re blinded by high stock prices, but their greed winds up screwing them as well – as it should.

xyz2055-It looks like McClendon and his partner built this company on the backs and resources of others and planted themselves firmly in the 1% at everyone else’s expense via depressing land prices, trading in his own commodity (which, by the way, should be treated as the UTILITY it is for everyone’s sake). I’d be willing to bet they’ve ruined a lot more livelihoods than they’ve generated, not to mention coming up with the 5k chemicals with which they poison the earth off of which you live. No one knows what those 5K chemicals are because that’s “proprietary information,” and they refuse to release that info to the public – and our politicians and the EPA let it slide all the way into the ground water. Whatever they are, they’re flammable coming out of wells and water faucets. These sycophants are just a couple of the many common parasites who think they’re entitled to live like gods at the expense of everyone else and have lost their own souls in pursuit of more money than they can possibly spend. If that’s your idea of impressive, you’re more pathetic than they are. I’ll bet your one of the 70% who still believes in the American dream notwithstanding the most massive illegal and immoral redistribution of wealth to the top 1% in human history. Take a painful step out of your willful ignorance and read a book, e.g., The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz. I advise against eating while you read it. Food’s too expensive these days to puke.