Instead, it said, the firm simply issued a verbal reprimand and prompted the executive to repay the expenses.
"The risk is that if the company makes loans to executives that exceed the executives' ability to repay the loans," said Russell Miller, a pay consultant at Mercer, "executives may be motivated to take greater risks than they should, to drive up the stock price".
Several current and former executives agreed to repay gains from the misdated options, including Alfred S. Chuang, BEA's chief executive, who realized a gain of $2.4 million.
So in theory, companies could quietly restate earnings that are, say, 10 per cent lower than originally claimed, without executives having to repay a penny of their compensation, which was linked to those numbers in the first place.
Richard Banks, UKAR's chief executive, is aiming to repay the loan in the next 10 years but still expects the organisation to be responsible for £20bn of mortgages even after the money is repaid.
A U.S. federal appeals court Thursday upheld much of the $27 million a former Cisco Systems executive was ordered to repay the company he admitted embezzling.
But when prices fall, the stock backing the loans loses value, and executives may be unable to repay the loans.
Perhaps the biggest problem is disclosure of, or rather nondisclosure of, the stock-for-loans swaps that hundreds of executives make every year to repay debts, governance experts said.
After a brief inquiry, the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, ordered Italy to repay 720,000 euros, or about $983,000, used by local authorities to pay for the concert last year in Naples.
