Embattled Occam CEO gets 21% raise

Occam Networks gave its chief executive officer a 21% raise in base pay six weeks after angry investors called for the CEO to resign.

Bob Howard-Anderson, who began this year with a base salary of $215,000, will begin next year with a base pay of $260,000. Should he meet all his performance objectives, he will be eligible for a bonus equal to that base salary.

That decision may confound several of the company’s investors. During the access equipment vendor’s last quarterly earnings call in October, investors excoriated management for accounting problems that forced Occam to restate its financial results for the past three years. “Shareholders are clearly fed up,” one investor said then. “We either [want to] get someone else new in there to do it better or put the company up for sale.”

Occam is still working to correct the procedures that allowed it to improperly count revenue, and it has lost business from some customers wary of Occam’s accounting practices. Partly as a result, the vendor’s net loss more than quintupled sequentially in this year’s third quarter.

Still, the company continues to boast of new customer wins and expects to take in between $85 million and $95 million in revenue next year (it estimates needing about $112 million to break even). And its chairman, Steve Krausz, who also sits on the board’s executive compensation committee, is standing by the CEO, telling Telephony in October that no search for a replacement is under way.

As the company previously indicated, Occam amended the CEO’s employment contract to remove disincentives to sell the company. Under the terms of the new agreement made late last month, if Howard-Anderson is terminated within six months of Occam changing owners, he is entitled to six months of his base salary ($130,000 next year), accelerated vesting of half of any unvested stock (the company expects to issue him more options next year) and free health care coverage for six months.

Last year Occam gave Howard-Anderson a 7.5% raise in base pay based on “positive developments” during 2005, “including the generation of operating income in the fourth quarter.” Occam originally reported $487,000 in operating profit that quarter, but after this year’s accounting audit, that figure was restated as $3,000.