In the week that Vince Cable wrote to remuneration committees to urge them to “seize the opportunity to bring pay in line with performance” (see our blog post for details), a few FTSE100 companies were also encouraged by their shareholders to think carefully about pay packages that have been awarded. Those companies will also now need … Continue Reading
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The European Commission has announced proposals to overhaul shareholder powers on executive pay, with several provisions seeming to imitate the new regulations that apply to UK incorporated companies that are listed on the Stock Exchange. Did the Commission really mean to flatter the UK government? The … Continue Reading
You may be disappointed if you were expecting consistency in the way FTSE 100 companies are reporting under the new Directors’ Remuneration Report Regulations (as The Large and Medium-sized Companies and Groups (Accounts and Reports)(Amendment) Regulations 2013 are more helpfully known). Surely, with all those rules and the endless guidance, there can’t be that much … Continue Reading
The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has recently published its paper “Collective Engagement Investor Exchange”, giving details of how its Investor Exchange mechanism, one of the means of improving shareholder engagement suggested in its July 2013 report on Corporate Governance and Shareholder Engagement, will work in practice. Invitations to meetings set up between the ABI … Continue Reading
On November 24, 2013, Swiss voters soundly voted down (65.3% to 34.7%), a proposal to limit the pay of companies’ highest paid managers to 12x that of their lowest paid rank-and-file workers, known as the “1:12 Initiative”. The 1:12 Initiative was raised by Switzerland’s Young Socialists, who succeeded in collecting 100,000 signatures to put the 1:12 … Continue Reading
On October 31, 2013, shareholders of Oracle Corp. voted “no” to CEO and founder Larry Ellison’s pay package worth $78.4 million (which is actually down 18 percent from the $96.2 million package he received a year earlier for which he also received a “no” vote by Oracle shareholders) (see Oracle Form 8-K filing). Approximately 56.3 percent of … Continue Reading
Executive compensation in the US is the highest in the world in both absolute terms and relative to median salary in the US (who can forget the widely publicized news report that J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson received a compensation package worth 1,795 times the average salary of a US department store worker?). Other countries, … Continue Reading
Fidelity Worldwide Investment has sent guidance to 400 of the companies that it invests in giving guidance on executive remuneration issues. In particular, Fidelity is looking for long-term incentives to vest after 5 years rather than the 3 year timescale that has been more common to date and may vote against pay policies that don’t … Continue Reading
