Yahoo COO walks away with largest golden parachute ever

Yahoo chief executive officer Marissa Mayer has been under a microscope ever since she took over the company in 2012. But now, with the pricey firing of chief operating officer Henrique de Castro, the former Googler is under even more scrutiny. De Castro will walk away from Yahoo with up to $109 million, according to reports citing research from Equilar, an executive compensation and corporate-governance data firm.

As crazy as it sounds, severance packages worth more than $100 million — like the one Yahoo gave fired COO Henrique De Castro this week — occur with some regularity in corporate America, and have since the 1980s. But that’s only if you’re talking about CEOs. De Castro was a No. 2. How unusual is it, I wondered, for someone who’s not the head honcho to get a nine-figure parting gift?  It’s unusual enough that GMI, the ratings and research firm whose data I cited in declaring De Castro’s golden parachute among the biggest ever, doesn’t even track them. In fact, GMI’s head of research, Gary Hewitt, tells me that packages of this size for non-CEOs are “as scarce as golden hen’s teeth.”