JPMorgan raises CEO pay to $20M

Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., received a 74 percent pay increase for 2013, the same year the company paid $20 billion in legal settlements and admitted to misleading investors ahead of the 2008 financial crisis.

The CEO of the nation's largest bank received $20 million, including $18.5 million of restricted stock recently awarded, the company said in a public filing on Friday.

The raise comes after a year in which Dimon's leadership at the bank coincided with a slew of legal penalties, including a massive settlement with the Justice Department over fraudulent activities.

Dimon's pay was curtailed to $11.5 million for 2012 — half his $23 million compensation in each of the prior two years, according to company filings — after the company lost $6.25 billion on bets known as the "London Whale" derivatives trades. When those trades first came to light in April 2012, Dimon dismissed them as a "tempest in a teapot."

U.S. median household income was $51,017 in 2012, adjusted for inflation, according to the Census Bureau.

Most employees at JPMorgan did not receive pay increases for 2013 because profits declined as a result of high legal bills to settle government and private claims against the bank. 

Directors cited Dimon’s 2012 pay cut as evidence that the board is independent from its chairman. The board's independence became an issue at the company's annual meeting when some shareholders tried, but failed, to pass a referendum to separate the roles of board chairman and CEO.

Shareholders voted against that proposal after board members said Dimon might leave if he did not retain his chairman title.            

The New York Times reported Friday that directors had decided to pay Dimon more for 2013 after a series of meetings that turned heated at times. JPMorgan spokesman Joseph Evangelisti said the Times' characterization of the director meetings was wrong.

The bank suffered a number of setbacks in 2013. That January, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency imposed sanctions on the bank for weak risk and financial controls, as well as deficient safeguards against money laundering and violations of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, over the 2012 derivatives loss.

Over the course of the year, the bank also agreed to a series of high-cost legal settlements, including $13 billion to resolve claims that it overstated the quality of the mortgages it was selling to investors before the financial crisis.

News of Dimon's raise came as Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview scheduled to broadcast Friday on MSNBC that no American financial institution is too large to indict and no bank executive immune from criminal prosecution, citing a case currently pending against JPMorgan.

A settlement with JPMorgan allowed prosecutors to pursue criminal charges if warranted, and that investigation is ongoing.

"There are no individuals who are in such high level positions that they cannot be indicted, criminally investigated," Holder said, according to an MSNBC transcript released before the interview.

The Justice Department is investigating "significant financial institutions," Holder said without elaborating.

"And the focus of those investigations is not only on the institutions but on individuals as well," he told MSNBC.

Holder told Reuters in December that the Justice Department plans to bring civil mortgage-fraud cases against several financial institutions early in 2014, using the JPMorgan case as a template.

Al Jazeera and wire services