Freddie Mac pays $700K to former exec's survivors

Freddie Mac is paying out more than $700,000 to the family of David Kellermann, the mortgage finance company's former acting chief financial officer who died last week in an apparent suicide, the company disclosed Thursday.

The McLean, Va.-based company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that Kellermann's survivors are due to receive $703,400 in retention and stock awards.

Freddie Mac was seized by the government last September. The company, which owns or guarantees about 13 million mortgages, lost more than $50 billion last year, and the Treasury Department has pumped in $45 billion to keep the company afloat.

Richard Syron, Freddie Mac's chief executive until he was ousted by the government last September, received compensation valued at $13.1 million last year, according to Associated Press calculations of data filed with regulators. However, the bulk of that package came in the form of stock awards valued at about $10 million when they were granted in March 2008, when the company's shares were trading around $20 per share.

Their value has dropped precipitously, closing at 79 cents per share on Thursday.

Syron received combined salary and bonus of $2.6 million last year, down from $4.65 million in 2007. Syron also received retirement benefits and other "perks" valued at more than $500,000, down from about $664,000 a year earlier.

The AP formula is designed to isolate the value the company's board placed on the executive's total compensation during the last fiscal year. It includes salary, bonus, performance-related bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted during the year.

The calculations don't include changes in the present value of pension benefits, and they sometimes differ from the totals companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those totals reflect the size of the accounting charge taken for the executive's compensation in the previous fiscal year.

The company's first government-appointed chief executive, David Moffett, received $338,000 in salary and perks for his work in the September-through-December period. He later left the company in March 2009, Freddie Mac said, but will return as a consultant in the wake of Kellermann's death.