Skip to main content

Stephen D. Weinroth

I'm a shareholder of Hovnanian Enterprises - symbol "HOV". Buying it was a very bad decision - but I'm a big boy and I went into it with my eyes wide open. However, the Board of Hovnanian decided to give company president Ara Hovnanian a bonus of just under $1 mil after a year where the firm incurred massive loses and the stock plunged.

Now, I'm fine paying huge bonuses to executives who produce, baseball players who hit homers or have low era's, and talk show hosts with big ratings. But rewarding a disastrous performance is stupid and inappropriate.

So, I wrote letters to the heads of the Audit Committee and Compensation Committee of HOV to let them know how I feel.

Somewhere is an SEC filing I got the address for Stephen D. Weinroth, who is head of the Audit Committee. Well, the letter cam back not deliverable. So, if there is someone from the SEC who monitors Google Alerts for SEC - you can check out why directors are filing bogus addresses with you.

And, since I couldn't get a letter to him - I'm putting it here.

Mr. Weinroth:
As a long-time shareholder of Hovnanian, I was shocked at the Board's decision to award Mr. Ara Hovnanian a bonus of almost $1 million. In a year that the firm lost over $1 billion and the share price collapsed, it was incomprehensible.
Shareholders expect better from Compensation Committees. For this year, please relate Mr. Hovnanian's incentive compensation to performance.
If Mr. Hovnanian finds it difficult to live on his $1.1 million base pay, he may have to cut back on custom-made suits and shirts.
Sincerely,
GM

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Reasons We Think America is On the Wrong Course

I was listening to the Michael Medved show yesterday. He does a nice job at talk radio. But he was worked up because the CBS News Poll showed that 72% of Americans surveyed think the U.S. is on the wrong track. (When I went to CBS' site, it looks to me like the number is 69%, but that's an insignicant difference). Medved's view is that income for the poorest citizens are rising (recent government data), unemployment is low, stock market is high, no cold war, so why so pessimistic? Here are my answers: Several of our young men and women are being killed every day in a war that we are getting sick of. The deficit is some unimaginable, staggering number that my generation is imposing on my children. Social Security is bankrupt and both Congress and the Administration (both previous and current, and both Republican and Democratic) are unwilling to face the issue. There are virulent infectious agents in hospitals that are resistent to essentially all antibiotics, and the drug co...

Stimulus Plan

Mr. President: The House stimulus bill is awful. Dangerous. Counter-productive. It has a very high probability of making things worse!. Your man Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be a tough guy: turn him loose on the House Dems - they are selling you down the river. Some simple tests: the spending will improve long-term productivity; the spending will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and the spending will happen fast; very, very fast. There may need to be some legislation to enable spending without years of environmental review. For example, spending on wind farms would improve long-run productivity and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But let's say the wind farm is a couple of miles offshore. You can't have environmental groups stopping the development to see if some fish will be harmed. This spending has to happen now. And, no tax cuts with the possible exception of AMT. People aren't going to spend any tax savings; they are going to pay their credit card bills or r...

Romney/Thompson dream ticket?

The role of Fred Thompson in yesterday's SC primary is as murky as his next step. Did he divide the religious vote and thereby hand Huckabee a loss? Or would those votes, had he not been there, have gone elsewhere? My instinct is that more of those votes would have gone to Romney or McCain than to Huckabee. Fred comes across to me as the thinking person's conservative: thoughtful on positions, a sense of history, a Federalist, serious about the war on terror and prepared to take the long view on it. His addresses have content, not sound bites - which may, unfortunately, be a drawback in 2008. Mitt is quickly seizing the stage as the most knowledgeable in the field on economics, growth and job creation. With a war still consuming dozens of billions, it isn't clear that the race will be won on voters' views of candidates job creation prowess. However, he gives off as much energy as Fred seems to absorb - Mitt's electron shell could power Fred. So, Mitt may be drawi...