Huber goodbye costs Broadwing $400K

Broadwing will pay its departing chief executive officer David Huber a severance fee of $400,000 (equal to his annual base salary), the company disclosed in regulatory filings Wednesday.

As Huber will remain chairman of the company’s board of directors, he will continue to receive company health benefits.

The severance agreement also allows all of Huber’s stock options to become fully vested. Huber was granted 170,000 stock options and 250,000 shares of restricted stock for the company’s 2004 fiscal year.

As of Dec. 7, 2005, Huber owned 9,546,049 shares of Broadwing stock (more than 6.5 million shares directly, the rest through trusts and other entities). At yesterday’s closing price of $9.28 (the stock climbed nearly 5% following the news of Huber’s departure), that stake would be worth nearly $88.6 million.

Following the mid-2000 initial public offering of Corvis, the equipment vendor Huber founded that eventually acquired Broadwing and assumed its name, Huber was one of America’s 30 richest people, with a net worth north of $8 billion. (One source declared him the world’s richest Mormon that year.) But most of that wealth was represented in Corvis stock, which has since lost much of its value.