Martha Stewart’s pay package – plenty of ‘good things’

Not everyone is feeling squeezed by the economic downturn.

Television host, publisher and corporate mogul Martha Stewart is still the epitome of the elegant lifestyle her diversified media and merchandising company promotes.

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In 2009, Stewart is slated to receive a guaranteed bonus of $495,000 from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), the company she founded in 1997. That’s on top of her $2-million-plus in compensation and another $2 million she gets for allowing the company to film shows at her residences, which include homes in Bedford, NY, Mt. Desert Island, ME, and East Hampton, NY, according to footnoted.org.

The details of her compensation package may upset some MSLO investors, however, who are not faring quite as well as the majority shareholder.

Company spokesperson Elizabeth Estroff told FishbowlNY in December that the company had eliminated about 100 jobs over the course of the year, as MSLO was “streamlining costs at the corporate and business unit levels.”

Moreover, while MSLO won’t announce fourth-quarter results for another week, its third-quarter results were disappointing. And the stock has been trading at under $5 a share since mid-November.

Perhaps because of her personal insulation, or perhaps because of her comeback since March 2005, when she completed a prison sentence for lying about a stock sale, Stewart has sounded relentlessly upbeat in interviews.

While on a tour promoting her latest book last October, she told CNBC: “The customer is there, and the customer wants good value. . . . They want products that fit their lifestyle at the present time when they are on, actually, some serious budgets.”

Perhaps. But after reading MSLO’s financial reports, one can’t help wondering what Stewart knows about “serious budgets.”

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