Company News: No bonuses for executives at Tyson

Because Tyson Foods Inc. failed to achieve earnings targets in its most recently completed fiscal year, senior executives will miss out on bonuses that totaled more than $5 million last year, the company said Tuesday.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the world’s largest meat producer said Chairman John Tyson, President Richard L. Bond and Chief Administrative Officer Greg W. Lee were ineligible for bonuses for 2006.

“Linking executive compensation to corporate performance results in a better alignment of compensation with corporate goals and shareholder interest,” the company’s compensation committee said in a proxy statement. “As performance goals are met or exceeded, resulting in increased value to shareholders, executives are rewarded commensurately.”

Tyson lost $196 million in fiscal 2006 — off from a net income of $372 million in fiscal 2005.

Last year, John Tyson earned a $3.25 million bonus on top of a $1.14 million salary plus other compensation in 2005; Bond earned a $1.38 million bonus above his $1.11 million salary and other compensation last year, and Lee was given a bonus of $600,000 over his $757,000 salary.

“The chief executives of Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. met last week, according to news reports Tuesday. Ford declined to confirm the meeting.

There was no word on the purpose of the meeting between Ford’s Alan Mulally and Toyota’s Fujio Cho, reported by the Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun and The Wall Street Journal’s Web site. The papers attributed information of the meeting to unidentified sources.

“We meet regularly with other automakers on a variety of topics of mutual interest,” Ford spokesman Tom Hoyt told The Associated Press. “We don’t discuss the content of these meetings.”

The meeting was in Tokyo, according to Nihon Keizai.

For the latest quarter, Toyota, Japan’s No. 1 automaker, earned $3.44 billion, while Ford lost $5.8 billion.

“Emirates Airline confirmed Tuesday that it was seeking financial compensation from Airbus, saying it had been “badly hurt” by the two-year delay in delivery for the super-jumbo A380 plane.

But the airline declined to discuss compensation figures published in the French press, saying the compensation clauses in the contract to purchase 45 of the European-built planes were confidential.

The rapidly expanding Emirates is the world’s biggest customer for the A380.