SiliconBeat

Well, that didn’t take very long.

Within a month of departing VeriFone after completing that company’s restatement of results from fiscal 2007 that lopped off $70 million worth of profits because of “material weaknesses” in the company’s financial reporting process, ex-CFO Barry Zwarenstein re-surfaced Wednesday as the new chief financial officer at Smart Modular Technologies.

We previously wrote about Zwarenstein’s separation agreement which, among other things, guaranteed that the only information VeriFone would give to any prospective employers doing background checks in the future would be his title and employment dates. VeriFone agreed specifically to not “communicate to such prospective employers any view regarding (his) performance or conduct while employed.”

Zwarenstein will be paid a $360,000 salary, less than the $400,000 he was pulling down at VeriFone, according to his employment agreement. His bonus is targeted at two-thirds of his salary, or $240,000, up from the $150,000 in bonuse he was paid last year at VeriFone. However, he agreed to cough that back up to the company when the restatements made those performance-based payments look undeserved in retrospect.

As for equity compensation, Zwarenstein is to receive an option good for 200,000 shares of Smart Modular to be granted and priced two-weeks after he began work Monday, which would be Sept. 22. The timing may be nearly perfect. Smart Modular shares hit an all-time low of $2.68 the day after he started work. Smart Modular released preliminary results for its just-ended fiscal 2008 fourth quarter that lowered guidance for both sales and profits, blaming the “prolonged and aggressive price-driven competition” for the DRAM-based memory modules it makes, as well as a deteriorating U.S. economy.

During his time at VeriFone, Zwarenstein netted $5.4 million from stock options he cashed in before VeriFone shares collapsed last December following the company’s initial announcement about its need to re-state recent results. VeriFone insiders as a group sold $340 million worth of stock during the 2007 fiscal year, results for most of which were restated last month.