SiliconBeat

SunPower, the San Jose maker of electronic devices used in solar power systems, is getting a new chief financial officer, which is one way to announce its losing its current one. Dennis Arriola will begin work next month when he will “work closely with retiring CFO, Manny Hernandez,” the company said in a release today.

Hernandez (pictured), 52,  joined SunPower in 2005, but was previously an executive at Cypress Semiconductor, the company that spun off SunPower into a separate company in November of that year. SunPower chief executive Tom Werner announced Hernandez’s planned retirement in an earnings call with analysts on July 15.  At the end of August, however, Hernandez was among those executives who entered into new employment agreements with the company.

The revised employment agreements included the adoption of a “corporate policy entitled the Management Career Transition Plan” which addressed “severance for employment terminations not in connection with a change of control.” We’re trying to find out if that will have any effect on Hernandez’s exit package.

His compensation in 2006 did  not included any stock or option awards, because of the “increased value of then outstanding equity awards” because of the company’s initial public offering. (Hernandez got $35.2 million worth of profit last year cashing out 600,000 options out.) The company had second thoughts a year later after reviewing a report by its compensation consultants, Radford Surveys + Consulting, which suggested that “equity compensation should represent a larger portion of the total compensation for Mr. Hernandez, to align his incentives with returns for stockholders,” according to the company’s last proxy.

The incoming Arriola comes to SunPower from Sempra Energy where he is senior vice
president and CFO of the company’s San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas divisions.