18/09/2013 00:00
TW
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by RAY FLEMING
THE Guardian's annual survey of boardroom pay in Britain makes for infuriating reading. True, the survey is for 2008 but it surely can be assumed that top businessmen would have been aware of darkening economic clouds sooner than the rest ot us and might therefore have taken measures to batten down the hatches rather than opening the champagne bottles. The crude statistics in the survey show that, while company profits in 2008 fell by 31 per cent and the FTSE 100 index had a similar decline, the remuneration of FTSE directors increased by 10 per cent. There are some horror stories in the details of individuals such as Bart Becht, the CEO of Reckitt Benckiser (Harpic, Veet and Strepsils) whose total remuneration rose to 36.8 million pounds and who has been paid 80 million pounds in the past three years. The survey contains details of many cases where failure in difficult conditions was interpreted as success and rewarded accordingly.

Doubtless the TUC at its current meetings with the prime minister will be asking what he intends to do to curb the excesses revealed in the survey. A more neutral observer, the LibDem's Vince Cable said yesterday: “The analysis shows the breathtaking cynicism involved in a lot of executive pay deals which are unrelated to either personal or corporate performance and involve people who are very well off helping themselves to larger salaries when private sector wages in many companies are being cut.”