SiliconBeat

There’s been a lot written in recent months about how Google has been building up its lobbying activities in Washington, D.C. As a relative newcomer to the world of politics, there’s been a perception that the whiz kids had lot of catching up to do. Back in June, the Mercury News’ Frank Davies wrote a good overview about just how rapidly the company was bulking up its D.C. presence.

Until now, though, the company hasn’t put a number on that investment. But in August, it filed a  disclosure form that provides the most complete picture to date of its lobbying activities. According to Google’s filing, the company spent about $580,000 lobbying the federal government during the first six months of this year. 

Alan Davidson runs the Washington operation for Google. And the company’s registered lobbyists includes Pablo Chavez, a former chief counsel for Senator John McCain.

It  has also retained three notable Washington lobbying firms to help push for approval of the DoubleClick merger. The first is Brownstein Hyatt & Farber whose lobbyists include Makan Delrahim, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The next is King & Spalding, whose lobbyists include Daniel Coats, a former ambassador to Germany. And the third is Podesta Group, which is also helping the company on a broad range of issues.

As far as the other issues that interested Google, there weren’t too many surprises. The company lobbied on privacy issues; patent reform; online childhood protection; H-1B visas; various open Internet initiatives; and energy efficiency. The company lobbied the U.S. House and Senate, the Federal Trade Commission, and the U.S. Department of State.

So how much more money is that from previous years? It’s hard to say. According to Opensecrets.org, Google spent $800,000 on lobbying activities in 2006. But the problem is that 2006 figure only captures part of Google’s activities. Because of a quirk in the lobbying disclosure rules, only the firms hired by Google had been filing disclosure forms. Google had not filed its own disclosure form - which covers its own staff and the spending on outside firms - until this year because its staff in Washington was not devoting the majority of its time to lobbying, said Adam Kovacevich, a Washington spokesman for Google in an interview. 

But the size of the spending is still fairly impressive for a new kid on the block. For instance, Cisco Systems (ticker:CSCO) of San Jose, which has a reputation for playing savvy politics, spent  $680,000 the first six months of 2007. On the other hand, Oracle (ticker:ORCL) spent $1.86 million through June.

Kovacevich said the company isn’t necessarily worried about matching its high-tech brethren.

“Our aim isn’t to keep pace with anyone,” Kovacevich said. “Particularly with industries that have been in Washington longer than we have. Rather, our goal is to be part of the public debates that affect our users.”

Any firm that lobbies the federal government is required to file lobbying disclosure forms every six months. The most recent one covers activity for the first six months of 2007. But companies have six weeks to file, and then because the documents must be scanned in by a disclosure office, it can take several more weeks before they appear on the U.S. Senate’s website.

How to put this kindly? Palm (ticker:PALM) has not exactly been setting the world on fire lately.

There was the decision to wax an ill-fated product that was widely ridiculed. And then there is the pending  restructuring involving a $325 million investment from Elevation Partners which was recently approved by shareholders.

But why let a few bumps in the road get you down? What this bunch needs is a shot in the arm. And there’s no better tonic for what ails ya’ than a nice pay raise.

On Monday, Palm filed an 8-K disclosing that it had given salary bumps to two executives:

• Andrew Brown, chief financial officer, will go from an annual salary of $392,500 last year to $420,000.
• John Hartnett, senior vice president of global markets, will go from $322,500 last year to $400,000.

Just think what those raises would have been if the company hadn’t done a pratfall…

On Friday, 942,000 shares of Akeena Solar traded hands, more than ten times the number the day before. By the end of the day shares of the Los Gatos designer and installer of solar power systems were up 19 percent, just shy of an all-time record. The price jump coincided with the company’s announcement that its chief financial officer was leaving, which we found curious.

Evidently some traders on Friday were prescient. Akeena shares jumped more than 10 percent again on Monday to their highest prices ever. The company announced that its stock, which had traded over-the-counter, would now be bought and sold on the Nasdaq Capital Market, beginning today.

Barry Cinnamon, the current CEO, was set to serve as interim CFO for the departing David “Lad” Wallace after his last day Sept. 28. The company said on Friday it was “working with Mr. Wallace to ensure an orderly and effective transition.”

Well, they worked fast. The company also announced today that it hired Gary Effren as its new chief financial officer. The name rang a special bell for us because, he use to work at Knight Ridder, which use to own The Mercury News, until it met an untimely death last year. Though they left that part out of the announcement.

For his part in managing the dissolution of KR, Effren received about $1.6 million for his Knight Ridder stock and options when the deal was completed, plus about 9,500 shares of stock in McClatchy, the company that bought KR. (Those shares have lost half their
value in the meantime.)

No word on Effren’s new pay package at Akeena, but we’ll be watching. On Friday, Akeena gave the outgoing Wallace a “restricted” stock grant for 25,000 that vested the same day.

And in the small-world-after-all department, the departing CFO spent about a half year in the same position for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which has since also been purchased by MediaNews, which now owns the Mercury News.

Don’t worry. Larry Ellison is still way richer than you. But he apparently has run up some big bills on his credit cards.  

We wrote about Oracle’s proxy filing last week. But we overlooked something that The New York Times picked up this weekend.

The Times found the following nugget in the proxy: 

“According to Oracle’s latest proxy statement, he has pledged 525 million shares of the company’s stock as collateral for personal borrowings. Those shares are worth more than $11.53 billion and by standard practice on Wall Street, he could have borrowed from $5 billion to $8 billion against them. By contrast, Oracle’s total debt is about $7.6 billion.”

Read the rest of The Times’ piece here.

Let us now turn our attention to IntraOp Medical (ticker:IOPM) of Sunnyvale. True, this may be the first and last time you’ve heard of this medical device company. Its stock trades over the counter, and it closed the other day around 8 cents. And its main product, Mobetron, sounds like the bad guy from a video game.

In fact, Mobetron is a new device that in theory provides a more efficient way to deliver the radiation treatments for cancer treatments. And who can root against something like that?

The company got a big dose of cash last month when it received $5.4 million from various private investors and restructured the company and its management team.

But there maybe no one who has greater faith in the future of Mobetron than its chief executive. According to a proxy filed Monday, the chief executive officer and several directors have personally loaned the company hundreds of thousands of dollars:

• Since Sept. 2004, Donald A. Goer, chief executive officer and a director, has loaned the company $742,755.
• Over the past three years, former director Mary Louise Meurk, has loaned the company $164,671.
• Michael Friebe, a director loaned the company $100,000.
• Two other directors made $5,000 loans.

We’ll see whether this proves to be a good show of faith, or foolhardy.

Microsoft released its proxy Friday, a week after that other software company, Oracle. Comparing the compensation between their two CEOs makes you wonder what makes each get out of bed in the morning to come to work.

The compensation committee of Microsoft’s board believes that it’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, “is underpaid for his role and performance; however, the Committee has accepted his recommendation to continue with Microsoft’s historical practice for his total compensation opportunity.”

Ballmer owns about 484 million shares of Microsoft, or about 4.3 percent of the company, worth some $11.7 billion as of Friday. He does not receive additional stock compensation , and hasn’t for at least 15 years. “As a leader of Microsoft, he focuses on building long-term success, and as a significant shareholder, his personal wealth is tied directly to sustained increases in value,”

Contrast this with Larry Ellison who, despite owning nearly a quarter of Oracle, more than 1.2 billion shares, worth $26.7 billion, received an option grant for 7 million more shares in 2007, up from 6 million shares the year before.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not often that a company’s shares jump 19 percent the same day it announces the impending departure of its chief financial officer, but that was the case today with Akeena Solar, which was the best performing stock in Silicon Valley Friday.

Read the rest of this entry »

In recent years, investors have responded to concerns about things like rising executive pay by submitting a rash of shareholder proposals. These proposals are voted on by investors at annual meetings and they are aimed at changing various corporate policies and improving governance. They usually face long odds, since management typically urges a vote against. And even if they pass, they’re non-binding, which means the board can still decide whether or not to adopt them. Usually, the advice is ignored.

But behold: Hewlett Packard has listened not once, but twice.

In an 8-K filed on Friday, the Palo Alto company said its board had adopted two provisions that shareholders had approved at the annual meeting back in March.

The first was designed to link pay to performance. This followed on the heels of the uproar caused by the severance pay granted to ex-CEO Carly Fiorina. Last spring, HP urged shareholders to vote against it, arguing that it would put the company at a competitive disadvantage.  

But on Thursday, the board, citing the shareholder vote, adopted a new plan that calls for most equity grants to vest only after a review of three years worth of financial performance. The company notes the details of the plan are still being worked out.

On the second item, the board adopted an amendment to its bylaws to require a shareholder vote on any poison pill plan. The company gives itself a little wiggle room by saying it could adopt such a plan without a vote, but then it would expire after one year.

Somewhere, a shareholder is smiling.

Just two days ago, we posted about Cisco Systems’ hiring boom  for the fiscal year ending June 2007. The San Jose networking company has been on a roll of sorts. And the latest evidence came in an 8-K filed Thursday that details the annual bonuses that were approved by the board last Friday. The top bananas who scored:

• John T. Chambers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, $3,500,000.
• Richard J. Justice, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Operations and Business Development, $2,329,875
• Charles H. Giancarlo, Executive Vice President, Chief Development Officer, $1,980,394
• Dennis D. Powell, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, $1,607,614
• Randy Pond, Executive Vice President, Operations, Processes and Systems, $1,607,614

Most shareholder proposals go down in defeat at annual meetings, while almost all
directors are re-elected. The actual results of shareholder votes are often not available
until months later and even then, the only data easily available are the final vote
totals.

The fact of the matter is that the votes of individual shareholders at annual meetings
don’t matter much, unless you happen to be Larry Ellison at Oracle and you control a quarter of your company’s shares. Institutional investors such as mutual and pension funds are the voters who wield the most clout.

Our colleague, Troy Wolverton, who covers Apple, spent quite a bit of time the past couple weeks diving into recent filings for the various funds run by some of Apple’s major mutual fund investors. The filings, known as N-PX, disclose how the funds voted at annual meetings of the companies in which they are invested.

And what he found is that there was a surprising amount of dissatisfaction with several
Apple directors and more-than-usual support for some shareholder proposals that the board had urged shareholders to reject.