KKR & Co. said Tuesday that it will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on July 15 and revealed the multi-million-dollar paychecks its famous founders took home last year.
The private-equity firm, which will trade under the symbol KKR, is switching listing venues from NYSE Euronext Amsterdam. European shareholders’ stakes will be converted into NYSE-listed common units. A separate stock offering also is planned at some point after the listing, but it is unlikely to take place on the same date unless market conditions improve. In a separate regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, the company said its top two executives took home $22.4 million in cash apiece last year.
Henry R. Kravis and George R. Roberts, founders of the private-equity company, garnered total compensation of $70.5 million each in 2009, the majority of which was in non-cash stock awards, according to the filing with the SEC. The $70.5 million doesn’t include cash. Each owns a 13 percent stake in the company, according to the filing.
They were each paid a salary of $62,500 last year, for the three months after the company’s reorganization and listing on Euronext in Amsterdam in October. Before that, all salaries were treated as distributions from the private-equity giant’s general partners and management companies of its funds, which made up the bulk of their cash takeaway. In 2010, the pair will each receive a salary of $300,000, the filing showed.
In addition to changing its listing venue, the company plans to sell shares to the public, but the two events are unlikely to be concurrent, given the volatile equity market in the U.S.; the share sale is expected to wait until better pricing conditions prevail.
The company has registered with the SEC to offer as much as $500 million in stock, but the exact number of shares or price could vary from the registration amount.
Besides Kravis’s and Roberts’s compensation information, the SEC filing document detailed the amounts earned by three other KKR executives in 2009: Chief Administrative Officer Todd A. Fisher, $5.3 million in cash; Chief Financial Officer William J. Janetschek, $2.2 million in cash; and General Counsel David J. Sorkin, $2.5 million in cash.
