Would you like a bonus?

Mar 11, 2008 11:06 GMT  ·  By

Remember the troubled Yahoo!, the company that is struggling to avoid being taken over by Micro 'The Bad Guy' Soft? Yeah, you know the one, it's been holding the headlines of the front pages for quite a while now, a month and almost a half, ever since the infamous bid was made, with scandals about lawsuits being thrown in its face and young talent leaving it like it was plagued. There's a good explanation for all of that, but I won't digress, so let's stick to the facts.

After firing about 1,000 employees and getting ready to hire another 500 in India, the company has just increased two of its top executives' bonuses for last year. Susan Decker, former Chief Executive Officer and current president, got a sweet $250,000 on top of her previous bonus, for 2006, raising it to the even sweeter sum of $1.1 million. Most people would be very happy with getting a 29 percent increase in salary or whatever it is they are getting (except if it's whopping time), but that percentage relating to a big number such as her bonus - heaven.

Yet again, memory time: do you recall general counsel Michael Callahan being the one that involved the Sunnyvale-based company in the scandal with the Chinese dissident in November? Apparently, he did something good besides that because he also got a bonus on top of that he received in the year before, but a lot smaller than Decker's. $25,000, that should be almost like pocket change for the big sharks that make up any company's board and adjacent command ring, yet this is how much he received.

The speculation above is only there because Yahoo! itself said nothing as to why the two received more money in 2007, in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.