Word: coss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Many U.S. executives savored fat bonuses last month after their companies pulled in record sales and profits. But not Lawrence Coss, the chief executive officer of mobile-home lender Green Tree Financial, who in 1996 surprisingly topped the list of highest-paid corporate leaders--overshadowing such titans as the Travelers Group's Sanford Weill and Walt Disney's Michael Eisner. Whoops! To his dismay, Coss may have to repay $40 million of the $102 million bonus he received that year because Green Tree now concedes that accounting errors led it to overstate profits. Says the taciturn and reclusive Coss...
...those of Green Tree, which was founded in 1975 in St. Paul, Minn., and has long been an industry leader. Hapless Green Tree investors have seen their stock sink from $50 a share last October to just $19 before it rebounded a bit to close at $24 last week. Coss, 59, a former used-car salesman who sports jeans and cowboy boots off the job, has seen the value of his own shares fall from $330 million to $145 million. Such misery has plenty of company: more than 20 Green Tree competitors have lost anywhere from one-quarter...
...Tree, where many shareholders remain bitter about the profit revision, which included a $190 million write-down for the fourth quarter of 1997. Angry investors have filed at least a dozen lawsuits, some charging that Green Tree used improperly "aggressive" accounting methods to tot up profits and thereby boost Coss's personal pay--a charge the company denies. Coss did enjoy a formula that accorded him a salary of $400,000 plus 2.5% of the company's pretax profits. Half the compensation was in cash, the other half in the form of Green Tree stock that Coss was allowed...
...Coss, who knew poverty firsthand as a child, is no stranger to financial setbacks. He quit school following eighth grade and failed as a car dealer before pulling himself out of bankruptcy and scraping together the funds to found Green Tree. Today he remains firmly in charge, particularly after the resignation of Green Tree president Robert Potts, who quit in December amid the furor over the income revisions. Not much given to displays of wealth, Coss maintains a vacation house in Flagstaff, Ariz., and likes to buy up land near his hometown of Miller...
...mistakes Coss continues to pay a hefty price in the form of bonus givebacks and the drop in the value of his shares. And he is unlikely ever to regain his crown as America's top-paid executive, because Green Tree has changed its compensation formula to make it less generous. Despite the recent turmoil, though, Coss will take home a pay package worth about $4 million for his work last year...