Outrageous CEO pay for publicly-held companies may be a trend that's about to end, if the revolt by Home Depot shareholders is any indicator. With Congress looking into the relationships between boards, CEOs and fat signing and exit packages, $210 million departing gifts may be over.

Wall Street analysts and bulls have defended fat paychecks for executives by saying that their performance justifies it. That's hard to argue when the Dow just hit a record 12,514 and the NASDAQ hit a six-year high at 2,484.85.

The problem is that shareholders aren't seeing the gains because huge sums of cash are being removed from the companies they invested in and being given to executives who sit on each other's boards and vote themselves high pay packages. Worse, many of these bonuses come in the form of back-dated stock options, which robs current shareholders of value, not to mention that it's common practice that's also illegal.

Home Depot's Robert Nardelli "resigned" under fire that the stock wasn't doing well enough to justify his exorbitant salary and bonuses. He took over. He exited gracefully, with a $210 million package, including a $20 million severance check. Shareholders are protesting by filing a restraining order in Superior Court of Fulton County to stop Nardelli from collecting all the funds. The shareholders had already filed suit in September charging that Home Depot executives and board members back-dated stock options to pay out more cash and that Nardelli's pay was exorbitant.

What makes this particularly nauseating is how Nardelli came to Home Depot in the first place. After failing to follow Jack Welch into the CEO position at General Electric, Nardelli took over the top spot at Home Depot, recommended by fellow GE alum and Home Depot's lead director on the board, Ken Langone. According to a news report, Langone was also on the board at GE, and he was also on the board at the New York Stock Exchange when NYSE CEO Dick Grasso's controversial pay package was approved. Grasso was serving on Home Depot's board when it hired Nardelli. Since then, Grasso's unbelievable $190 million pay package (particularly for a not-for-profit corporation) kick-started the debate on egregious Wall Street salaries. The NYSE was sued by the New York State Attorney General in 2004 over Grasso's pay, and Grasso just this week asked the state appeals court to throw out an order demanding that he return approximately $112.2 million to the NYSE.

Nice work if you can get it. All you have to do is be part of the gentlemen's club.

But now investors are doing more than grumbling and hope to get Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., among others to do something about it. Frank, who has been no friend to the real estate industry, may be more effective against incompetent and overpaid CEOs. Frank is the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee , which oversees "all components of the nation's housing and financial services sectors including banking, insurance, real estate, public and assisted housing, and securities."

One of the results of the new Democratic-controlled Congress is that bills that were ignored by the Republican majority may get new life. In November of 2005, Congressman Frank, then Senior Democrat on the committee, introduced H.R. 4291, "The Protection Against Executive Compensation Abuse Act."  designed to empower shareholdes to "review and approve their company's comprehensive executive compensation plan." 

According to Frank's website, when the bill was introduced, it received wide Democratic support, but not a single Republican signed on to co-sponsor the bill. Democrats requested a hearing on the subject of executive compensation and were denied. "In response, in May of 2006, all 33 of the minority committee members signed a letter to invoke the rarely used committee Rule XI to force a hearing on the issue of executive compensation." This hearing on executive compensation abuse was held on May 25, 2006.

"Since then, Democratic members of the Financial Services Committee called for a meeting to mark-up and vote on "The Protection Against Executive Compensation Abuse Act," but Republican leadership refused to schedule a mark-up of the bill. In response, in July of 2006, every Democratic member of the committee and the one Independent member signed a letter to attempt to force a mark-up of the bill. Under committee rules, a majority of members of the committee can force a mark-up of a bill. If only three Republican members of the committee were to join this effort, there would be enough support to force a mark-up of the bill. Not a single Republican member of the committee has come forward to do so."

But that could change.

What's the benefit for the real estate industry? None, directly, but there could be a huge benefit indirectly. Frank may redirect his attention away from hounding Realtors with hearings and bills such as the "Fair Choice And Competition In Real Estate Act, he co-sponsored with Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, then chair of the House Financial Services Committee. The act has gone nowhere, and reigning in outrageous executive pay by empowering shareholders to participate in deciding the fairness of executive compensation is a much broader consumer-friendly pursuit.

Second, greedy CEOs can replace Realtors as the black sheep of the front page, which in turn will ease the desperate fight many Realtors have at the kitchen table level defending their commissions.