Dow Chemical has agreed to pay $1.75 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission after failing to disclose perks it gave to its former CEO.
It's neither illegal nor rare for a company to give its top executives perks like the ones Dow gave to Andrew Liveris: paying for a lavish private Superbowl party, for example, and personal travel on the company jet.
But it is against Securities and Exchange Commission rules not to disclose the perks on proxy statements, as Dow did between 2011 and 2015.
Midland-based Dow didn't disclose a total of three million dollars' worth of the benefits, and the company, now merged with DuPont, will pay a fine of more than half that as a penalty.
The company will also hire an independent consultant to make sure it's following the rules going forward.
The non-disclosure of benefits came to light after a former Dow Chemical fraud investigator filed a whistleblower lawsuit, claiming she was fired for questioning the company's spending, and accounting of that spending, to benefit its CEO.
