Fannie CFO Johnson's Pay Starts at $625,000

For the big finance job ahead for Fannie Mae, the company detailed the pay plan for new CFO David M. Johnson. At the center of the incentives-laced package is a $625,000 annual salary that is slightly lower than what his predecessor received.

The compensation plan for the veteran finance chief, who formerly was at the Harford Financial Services Group and Cendant Corp., also includes a cash bonus provision focusing on both corporate and individual performance goals for 2009, and a long-term deferred-cash incentive that individual performance and market-compensation levels will determine. That will vest over two years, with 50 percent payable in early 2010 and the rest in 2011.

Target amounts for Johnson's cash bonus and long-term incentives are 185 percent and 275 percent, respectively, of annual salary. Performance goals and possible minimum or maximum bonus and long-term incentive amounts have not been established, according to the mortgage insurer's Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Vesting of the long-term incentive will be based on corporate criteria for 2009, "and possibly on additional corporate performance criteria for 2010," the filing said.

The 48-year-old Johnson was appointed on Nov. 24 to succeed David C. Hisey, who took the newly created position of executive vice president and deputy chief financial officer. Most recently, Johnson had resigned from the Hartford in April, after seven years at the big insurer. He is also a former Merrill Lynch associate of newly named Fannie Mae president and CEO Herbert M. Allison Jr.

Before Hisey took the CFO job at Fannie Mae in August, the finance chief was Stephen Swad. Hisey, who joined Fannie Mae in 2005, played a key leadership role in the embattled company's lengthy and complex restatement under former CFO Robert Blakely.

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