Company: LAZ
Filing Date: 2025-04-30
Form Type: DEFA14A
Source: 0001140361-25-016471
Chunk: 2

Company: Lazard, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-30
Form: DEFA14A
Chunk 2
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 Corp.; Robinhood Markets, Inc.; and T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. We do not view Blue Owl Capital, Freedom Holding, or Robinhood as peers, and we do not believe any investor does.

| 1 | The Changed ISS Peer Group also removed two companies. |

Freedom Holding is a Kazakhstan-based retail brokerage and investment banking firm primarily in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Unlike Lazard and the other members of the peer group, it has minimal U.S. operations; by our calculation, fewer than 9% of their employees are in the United States and the vast majority are in Central Asia. Compounding the lack of comparability, the company appears to have a low amount of shares available for public trading (less than thirty percent float) and generally trades at a low volume (less than 100,000 average daily volume) with the CEO and chairman beneficially owning nearly 70% of the company’s outstanding common stock and only a small percentage owned by institutional shareholders. It is objectively unreasonable to conclude that Freedom Holding is a comparable peer from a compensation or TSR perspective, from a shareholder base perspective or from any non-arbitrary perspective. Using Freedom Holding as a peer is wrong. Without Freedom Holding your analysis fundamentally changes Removing Freedom Holding from the Changed ISS Peer Group alone moves the Company from “cautionary low” to “low” concern under the ISS methodology for Relative Degree of Alignment, indicating no pay and performance misalignment. Annex Aincludes the relevant calculations and the calculations referenced in the following section. This result is consistentwith the Original ISS Peer Group and with our own peer group Using the peer group ISS selected to evaluate our 2023executive compensation program and applying that to our 2024 executive compensation program produces a “low” concern under the ISS methodology. Also, using the Company’s selected peer group as described on page 32 of the 2025 Proxy Statement (the “Lazard Peer Group”) produces a “low” concern under the ISS methodology. When measured against the appropriate peers, our pay and performance are well aligned. Only when using your Changed ISS Peer Group withFreedom Holding is the result different (and even then it is a “cautionary low” concern). Our Pay and Performance Are Well Aligned When Using with Appropriate Fair Values ISS’s 2023 CEO pay calculation is overstated by more than $21 million ISS’s calculation of CEO pay values the Stock Price PRPUs granted to our CEO in 2023 at more than twice the amount calculated by the Company. As