Executive pay is undermining the public’s faith in capitalism November 26, 2018 Question: what connects the leader of a York-based housebuilder with a car executive in Tokyo? Answer: both have recently been embroiled in scandals over top pay. Carlos Ghosn, chairman of Nissan, is under criminal investigation in Japan for under-reporting his remuneration to the Tokyo Stock Exchange and misusing company assets. Nissan removed him from post [...]
Bet365’s billionaire boss Denise Coates pockets massive £265m payout November 21, 2018 The chief executive of online bookie Bet365 Denise Coates took home £265m last year after giving herself a £21m pay rise. The billionaire businesswoman pocketed a salary of £220m, an increase from £199m last year and roughly a third of Bet365’s total profits for the year to the end of March, according to the company’s accounts. Coates, [...]
Profit or purpose? Business must find a better balance November 15, 2018 Last week, I attended a meeting of entrepreneurs backing Small Business Saturday (coming up on 1 December) to look at a survey of what motivates these firms. I expected a tirade against red tape and tax. What we got was the news that, of over 1,000 SMEs polled, only 60 per cent were primarily driven [...]
Mind your own business and stay out of Persimmon’s bonus scheme November 8, 2018 The news that Jeff Fairburn has been asked to leave Persimmon in the wake of the furore over his £75m bonus should not come as a surprise. There is a febrile atmosphere of media scrutiny when it comes to such matters, and shareholders had already branded the long-term incentive scheme pay-out as “grossly excessive”. Unfortunately, [...]
City heavyweights including L&G’s Nigel Wilson, Sainsbury’s David Tyler and BNY Mellon’s Helena Morrissey join working group to overhaul executive pay September 8, 2015 A new panel of city executives is exploring whether to scrap long-term share awards as part of a radial overhaul of city boardroom culture. The Executive Remuneration Working Group was set up by the Investment Association, which represents the UK's £5.5 trillion asset-management industry, to examine how to simplify executive pay. Daniel Godfrey, chief executive [...]
Executive pay: FTSE 100 bosses miss out on bonus boost September 6, 2015 More than a third of FTSE 100 chief executives missed out on pay rises this year, according to a PwC report out today. This is up from a quarter of bosses whose pay did not get a lift in 2014. Of those who received a boost, the average increase was three per cent, taking [...]
US executive pay dwarfs UK best-paid bosses pay checks: These CEOs are paid 200 times as much as their employees August 25, 2015 American bosses earn 204 times more than their workers – blowing British pay gaps out of the water. The best-paid FTSE 100 chief is WPP’s Martin Sorrell, but despite taking home 800 times more than his employees, his £29.8m pay check last year doesn’t even come close to the US record high. David Zaslav, chief [...]
Executive pay: Capping bosses’ salaries will not raise the salaries of people at the bottom August 17, 2015 Today’s briefing paper from the High Pay Centre (HPC) has zoned in on the gap between FTSE 100 chief executive pay and the average salary of UK workers in 2014: 183/1. Perhaps it is the HPC’s emphasis – or perhaps it is the world’s recent focus on inequality – that has most people, in the media and [...]
FTSE chief executive pay: How long would it take you to earn as much as these top 10 highest earners? August 17, 2015 The pay packets of the FTSE 100's top bosses has fallen in real terms, with chief executives taking home around £80,000 less than previous years, adjusting for inflation. You probably won't see any of them cutting back, though. That's a drop in the ocean of their annual income from salaries, bonuses, share awards and other remuneration, which [...]
Reforming UK executive pay is tortuous, but worthwhile May 27, 2015 Like electing a boss of Fifa whose surname isn’t Blatter or extracting an apology from Thomas Cook, reforming executive pay in the UK is a tortuous process. Vince Cable, the last Business Secretary, had a decent stab at it, introducing a binding vote on pay policies which yielded initial dividends in recalcitrant boardrooms. [...]