Kloppers bags $6.6m as BHP ices exec wages
THE BASE salary for miner BHP Billiton’s senior executives will be frozen for the next year, the FTSE 100 firm’s annual report revealed yesterday, as it battles to counteract falling iron ore prices.
Chief executive Marius Kloppers received no short-term incentive as well as having his salary frozen, due to the $3.3bn (£2bn) shale gas write down earlier this year.
Kloppers was awarded $6.6m in the 2012 financial year, down from $11.059m last year.
He also takes home 33,327 performance shares that were allocated in December 2007, worth around $6.7m at today’s market price.
Short-term incentives – which are entirely performance-based and are 50 per cent cash and 50 per cent deferred shares – for BHP Billiton’s eight-strong group management committee members fell by more than 50 per cent for the financial year ended 30 June.
UK life peer Baroness Shriti Vadera, who joined the board in January 2011, received $260,000 for her role.
Despite a 40 per cent drop in his take-home pay from last year, Kloppers is the highest paid Australian executive, according to the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors.
The pay freeze came as Australia trimmed its expected earnings from mining exports by 10 per cent for the year to A$189bn, as worries about demand from China took their toll.