The CEO and her cronies have never cared about the well being of this company or its employees, their only interest has been to manipulate numbers on paper at the expense of innovation and employee benefits, for their own personal benefit.
Employee non-compete agreement confusion
At a recent all hands meeting to discuss the acquisition, err, merger with GTECH, the CEO admitted that she was not focused on innovation due to the nature of our small time wall street investors who were only concerned with quarter to quarter results.
Investing in innovation was not on the agenda if it did not payoff in the next quarter.
When asked if existing employee non-compete agreements would still be in place after the buyout, the CEO said current non-compete agreements would expire upon execution of the GTECH acquisition and that new non-compete agreements would need to be executed.
Employees who later asked IGT legal and HR to confirm this, were told that the CEO never said this, it was heresay. They would not confirm that the non-compete agreements would expire as the CEO had publicly stated they would.
Despite the confusion and concern, neither the CEO nor her management has issued a clarification.
Retention Bonus
The CEO gets a $3.2M retention bonus for seeing the GTECH merger through to completion or failure.
This is in addition to the benefits she receives upon execution of 'Change of Control' as described in the 2014 IGT proxy statement.
So, why should the CEO need a retention bonus considering the Change of Control benefits she will reap when the deal goes through ?
Employees have been told that there will be no RSU grants this year (typically 10+% of salary), instead employees have been offered a 'Retention Bonus'. The bonus amount is strictly based on level, typically 3% of salary.
How can this possibly be considered a retention bonus ?
Annual Bonus
Employees have been warned that there may not be an annual bonus this year due to poor performance.
I'll bet the CEO gets a nice bonus regardless.
Is GTECH sale in best interest of shareholders?
Scientific Games (SG) recently held an all hands meeting at WMS where the CEO commented that they had been in acquisition talks with IGT. Allegedly they were considering a $6B offer to buy IGT but the IGT CEO was asking for a $50M bonus and retention of some of her cronies. Allegedly, SG didn't want the current IGT CEO or her management team and moved on.
In a nutshell
The CEO is a looter and a modern day carpetbagger in every sense of the word (look it up).
She has taken advantage of an unfortunate situation and bled the company dry for her own personal benefit.
She has never created or built anything in her career, yet, has damaged the careers and success of those who have.
She has destroyed IGT and profited from it, all the while claiming success.
The only consolation I can take from this is to know that she is universally despised both within and without IGT.
I don't know what GTECH expects to do with the carcass that remains, perhaps there is enough left for a watery stew ? There is not much else.