As Layoffs Begin, Wyeth Execs Get $75 Million Severance Package

(MoneyWatch)  The top five executives at Wyeth will receive $75 million between them in the Pfizer acquisition, according to an analysis by Equilar, a corporate compensation consultancy. The jackpot payouts come as their plan calls for 19,500 of their colleagues to be made jobless, and the merger they negotiated was paid for with $22.5 billion in taxpayer money. According to Equilar, a compensation analyst:

• The top five Wyeth execs will receive $75 million between them.
• CEO Bernard Poussot would get a total of $18 million under the change-in-control agreement
• Former chairman Robert Essner gets $24 million
• CFO Gregory Norden gets $9 million
• President Joseph M. Mahady gets $15 million
• Former president Robert Ruffalo gets $9 million.

Wyeth's management is expected to to depart from the new company. The New York Times points out that it could have been much more extreme. Under an agreement executed in 2006, the payouts were actually cut by 55 percent.

Meanwhile, the merger is having Dickensian consequences for staff and towns dependent on Pfizer and Wyeth. Ex-employees of Pfizer's Ann Arbor, Mich., site who accepted transfers to other parts of the country last year because the Ann Arbor campus was closing down may now lose their new jobs in the wave of layoffs generated by the acquisition of Wyeth. The Ann Arbor Business Review:

Pfizer announced in January 2007 that it would close its Michigan research operations as part of a global restructuring plan. More than 2,100 Ann Arbor employees, including thousands of world-class scientists, were displaced.

Pfizer spokesman Rick Chambers said 1,180 of Ann Arbor's employees were offered transfers - and 850 accepted. They transferred to sites in Groton, Conn.; St. Louis; LaJolla, Calif.; Sandwich, U.K.; Boston; New York; and Kalamazoo.

The director of the state's life sciences association says he knows several ex-Ann Arbor employees who have already gotten their notices.

Over in Madison, N.J., town officials are quietly fretting over the future of Wyeth's gigantic contributions to the towns tax rolls. The Madison Eagle:

• The company paid $1,239,000 in taxes to Madison last year, and $1,180,000 to the borough's electric utility.
• It employs 900 people in the borough.
• It also funds charity events, including the Mayor's Wellness Campaign in Madison and Florham Park; a 5K run for the benefit of Project Community Pride, a youth counseling agency; a "health fair" as part of Madison's annual "Bottle Hill Day" street festival downtown; and it's a major benefactor for the United Way of Morris County.
• Wyeth even has a representative on the borough's Downtown Development Commission.

Doubtless Essner, Poussot et al will give some of that money to charity.