NEW YORK, 27 September 2003 — H. Carl McCall, who became the public face of the New York Stock Exchange after Dick Grasso was pressured to resign over his lavish pay, is leaving the board after the organization’s interim chairman reports to work next week.
In a letter Thursday, McCall told interim chairman John S. Reed he hoped the exchange could “move forward without being encumbered by the past.” The former New York state comptroller is the first director to resign since Grasso stepped aside last week in the face of public fury over his $187.5 million pay package.
“I’ve done the job, I think the job has been done well and it’s time to move on,” McCall said in an interview on the New York cable news station NY1. “I want to make it very clear to everybody that John Reed will have an opportunity to do what’s necessary to bring about needed reforms at the exchange,” McCall said. “I don’t want anybody in the way that represents the past or gives the impression that we’re still trying to do business as usual.”
Big changes are anticipated for the NYSE board, which has been harshly criticized for approving Grasso’s extravagant pay package in the first place. Reed, the former co-CEO of Citigroup, has already suggested the 27-seat board be pared down to about a dozen members.
McCall, an NYSE board member since June 1999 and chairman of the compensation committee for the last three months, has said he was not aware of important details of Grasso’s compensation.
Grasso’s pay was set in a contract approved in May 1999. Under an August contract revision, Grasso was paid a lump sum of $139.5 million in accumulated benefits and savings, and was owed an additional $48 million in vested funds over the next four years — which Grasso said he would forgo in the face of growing public resentment.
In his letter to Reed, McCall said he would preside over a meeting Monday where directors would hear public testimony and consider ways to reform the NYSE. Later that day, McCall said, he would present the recommendations to Reed.
“What we have learned in the past few weeks is that disclosure is a good thing, and should be done consistently and continually,” McCall wrote. He added that his special committee on governance had worked hard to come up with ways to improve the exchange.
