“The executives received the maximum bonuses possible in a year when [BP] made a record loss,”

I wouldn’t mind betting that for most of the organisation below that level the losses were used as a reason no bonuses were paid.

I can confirm that all employees had huge bonus payments in their March paypacket. My wife has just left the employ of BP and you would be amazed at how much money they pay their staff compared to any other business with the exception of tobacco companies.

Oil and gas at boardroom level is like the Tory party, they’re so far removed from reality it hurts.

I kid you not, at a time when we were making huge redundancies around Christmas the weekly newsletter from the gods headlined with how the restructuring was good for everyone, making us leaner and more agile into 2016, and better able to meet customer needs. This was before those being made redundant had even left the building, and a lot of us were still waiting to hear if we were redundant.

Redundancy for everyone else – statutory plus a (derisory) bit.
Pay off when they finally sacked our CEO – £4million&change.

As a soon to be ex-oil and gas employee, I’m not, but then most of the engineering side of things is competing with the requirements that they need the brightest and the best, and competing with the banks for them (one of the biggest employer of graduate Process Engineers is investment banking, it’s all maths and problem solving at the end of the day).

That’s not even limited to BP. The general reaction to bonuses this year has been “WTF? A Bonus? Are you Mental?” Followed quickly by “oh well if you insist!”

Agree that shareholders should reject this at the AGM and challenge the remediation Committee to prove their worth. Otherwise none of my business.

And….?

An interesting stat reflecting lots of things, but not how wages are determined.

Yet the boardroom occupants, with their enormous annual increases, who’ve overseen this collapse in this countries competitiveness, and dire productivity record, deserve their huge annual salary increases and massive bonuses because…..?

Just because….

Whilst I agree the salary is obscene, has anyone else looked at other Oil and Gas Ceo salaries? It would also be interesting to see how many of the companies you’ve actually heard of.

Possibly FF, but our (UK) track record is not that promising. But I wish that was the case.

Who said the CEO deserves it binners? That’s for the shareholders and the remuneration committee to decide. I don’t know the ins and outs but would doubt that £14m is justified but we have pretty lazy shareholders these days.

Lots of companies overpaying their CEOs who are delivering returns below their costs of capital. But shareholders have been poor at holding them to account. Look at our largest bank…..

Unsurprisingly binners that does not hold up to scrutiny. Indeed the reward (sic) in question has been the subject of intense debate over the past few weeks. The body that represents 20% of the shareholders has been lobbying against it as have other shareholders.

Only just clicked on the OP’s link – the headline was a bit of a giveaway

Well we will find out at the AGM but they also include other groups and individual investors – the link notes Aberdeen and Royal London AM for example.

At least the exaggerated nature of comments ^ match the reward itself.

In a Devils Advocate defense of his pay; he’s been paid £14million to run a loss making company, which is a bargain even if the next best guy wanted to do it for free and would have made £15million more losses (which would still be a drop in the ocean relative to the losses). Don’t forget he has hit all his targets for the year, and may well have delivered the best outcome for shareholders given oil is bouncing along at about 1/6th what it used to be.

Most of them, but then I work for a design contractor, so I’ve indirectly worked for a lot of them too.

Some of the numbers are obscene, but a lot of them will own large number of shares in the companies too, hence you get overall incomes like £80million at the top end (and an odd bias towards small-medium sized companies being at the top rather than Shell/Exxon/BP).

(Inferred from the tone of your post) logical fallacy, just because 20% don’t support it, doesn’t mean the remainder do, they’re just not represented by the same group.

So what about the other 79%?

Heres how it works

US CEO’s earn considerably more, £100m+ not uncommon so the amount is relatively modest on a global scale. There is a counter argument which says in these very troubled times you need the best people to try and navigate your way through the difficulties. I don’t have a view on BP specifically.

As I have posted before if CEOs are limited to a multiple of lowest all those jobs will be outsourced to agencies. Such a pokicy would have little impact

And it wasn’t limited, and presumably shareholders, directors and whoever else decided that they could make more money by employing the best people, so competition for those few increased and salaries went up.

It’s already the done thing anyway. Most big companies outsource the unskilled jobs so that when pay rises and performance and retention bonuses come round they can offer everyone a reward, without it having to mean everyone (like it or not, the cleaners are replaceable with another cleaner, and the cleaner at Shell is worth no more than the Cleaner at McDonalds).

So you’d cap pay at £750,000

Yes that’s a lot of money, but it’s not exactly going to attract international companies to the UK is it? Even Wiggins and Froome would be digging out their Belgian/Kenyan passports.

£500k total job income per annum cap sounds fair to me. Who the heck needs £14M or even £1M per year (which is ~76x the income of a 40-hour week at £7.20ph)?