EQT CEO says he left because of pay dispute
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Steve Schlotterbeck, who resigned suddenly and mysteriously on Thursday from the helm of EQT Corp., took to social media on Friday to dispel rumors that there’s anything sinister going on.
“It was just a plain vanilla disagreement between me and board on my value to the corporation,” he wrote in a message on LinkedIn on Friday morning.
The cryptic “personal reasons” that the company cited “does not mean that I or my family have any health issues nor is there any sort of #metoo scandal brewing,” he said
“Looking forward to having some time off and excited about whatever is next!”
The post was immediately inundated with further well wishes and a few career suggestions.
The disagreement with the board was over his compensation, Mr. Schlotterbeck confirmed to the Post-Gazette.
“My ask was to be paid at the average of EQT’s peer group, which I thought was very fair given the year we had,” he said. “The board obviously disagreed.”
EQT’s peer group, a set of companies that compensation firms use to benchmark pay, likely has changed for the bigger since EQT’s acquisition of Rice Energy Inc. last year. The merger created the largest natural gas producer in the nation.
Mr. Schlotterbeck’s direct compensation in 2016 was $5.6 million. In 2015, it was $6 million.
Data for 2017, the year he became CEO, isn’t yet available — EQT has not yet filed its proxy statement with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
The most recent proxy, filed early last year, allows Mr. Schlotterbeck a payment of $3.4 million if he resigns “for good cause” and $1.3 million if his departure is deemed to be “without good cause.” It’s not clear how the disagreement over pay will be categorized.
Mr. Schlotterbeck’s resignation took people inside the company and in the industry by surprise, as did EQT’s curt statement about the matter.
It’s typical for publicly-traded companies to announce the departure of a board member or executive by disclosing if it was caused by a disagreement. EQT did not do so with its brief statement on Thursday and it has yet to file a form with the SEC.
On Thursday, the company had scrubbed Mr. Schlotterbeck from its website and he, in turn, set his LinkedIn status to “retired” and added a new position — “unemployed.”
On Facebook, he officially left his job at EQT at 9:37 p.m. Wednesday night.
Mr. Schlotterbeck lives in Richland with his wife, Brenda. They once said they expect to retire and live there for the rest of their lives. He has a two-year noncompete agreement with EQT.