The earnings of Stephen Schwarzman, the Chief Executive Officer of Blackstone Group, went up by 75% last year, Reuters reported.
According to the company's annual report, the earnings of the private equity chief as a result of his dividends and pay reached $374.5 million. The rise coincided with the 66% increase in Blackstone's distributable earnings last year which reached $1.9 billion. The meteoric rise was due to the fact that the private equity giant was able to offload more assets at a heftier price tag due to favorable market conditions, the report said.
Schwarzman, who is also a Blackstone Co-Founder, profited from his one-fifth ownership stake in the company. The dividends or cash distributions he got reached $352.5 million while his executive compensation was $22 million, with most of the compensation coming from what is known as carried test or the take of the private equity firm of the investment profits earned by its funds, the report said.
A Bloomberg report about the matter quoted Schwarzman as saying that the company is on solid footing. Schwarzman said in a television interview, "We're in a really marvelous position and I don't worry about growth -- it's just coming at us. I worry about delivering great investment products for investors. And if you do that all the time and you do it at scale, good things will happen to you."
With the stock markets rebounding last year, Blackstone was able to give back $38 billion to its private equity, real estate and credit and hedge funds backers. Some of the shares that the private equity unit unloaded in 2013 included that of Nielsen Holdings, SeaWorld Entertainment Inc, Pinnacle Foods and Merlin Entertainment Plc. Blackstone, however, still has unrealized profit from the initial public offering of Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. Until the private equity giant starts to sell its shares in the hotel chain, the more than $10 billion profit it earned in that deal will only be on paper, Bloomberg reported.
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