Steven Black and William Winters, co-heads of JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s investment bank, will forgo cash and stock bonuses for 2008 and accept only stock options, a regulatory filing showed, Bloomberg reported.
The two executives were each awarded 700,000 stock appreciation rights, to be paid at the discretion of the board and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, the New York-based bank said in filings yesterday. The stock will be awarded based on future company performance and must be held for five years, the bank said.
Bonus payments for top JPMorgan executives fell about 75 percent from 2007, a person familiar with the matter said today, declining to be identified because not all the payments are public. Dimon, 52, won't take a bonus, said spokesman Joseph Evangelisti.
Wall Street's top executives won't take a bonus this year, including Morgan Stanley's John Mack, Citigroup Inc.'s Vikram Pandit and Goldman Sachs Group Inc's Lloyd Blankfein. Bank of America Corp's Kenneth Lewis recommended that neither he nor his top executives receive bonuses for 2008.
The JPMorgan stock appreciation awards were priced at $19.49, the average of the high and low price of trading on Jan. 20, according to Bloomberg data. Shares of JPMorgan fell 21 percent that day and have since climbed to $24.28.
JPMorgan posted full-year 2008 profit of $5.6 billion. It took a fraction of the writedowns and losses of rivals including Citigroup and Wachovia Corp.
