A one-time Value Creation Plan of 425,000 performance share units, approved at the annual meeting on 9 September 2026, worth about US$800m if it pays in full. A quarter vests if Arm is worth US$1tn by 31 March 2029, another quarter at US$1.5tn by 2030 and the remaining half at US$2tn by 2031, measured on the average close over any 60 days before each deadline; missed tranches roll forward into later ones, and each vests two years after its milestone, running to 1 April 2033. At the top target the shares would be worth about US$1,880 each. Haas was separately paid US$60.6m in FY2026, and the policy lifts his ordinary performance-share maximum from 125% to 200%.
Debited DR
ISS and Glass Lewis both told shareholders to reject the package as excessive, and ISS also opposed re-electing Haas and chairman Masayoshi Son over board independence. Every resolution passed — SoftBank holds 922,733,999 shares, 86.4% of the company.
Both advisers the shareholders pay for said no. The shareholder holding 86% said yes. That was the vote.
Disclosed in a Form 8-K/A on 1 September 2026: a US$2m salary from 26 September and an FY27 equity award with a target value of US$45m, split evenly between performance shares tied to Apple's total shareholder return against the S&P 500 and time-based shares vesting in equal 12.5% tranches every six months for four years. The incoming chief executive, John Ternus, was set at US$58m — a US$3m salary and US$55m of target stock.
Debited DR
Apple reported record June-quarter revenue of US$109.4b on 30 July, up 16%, with research and development at a record US$11.73bn, up 32% on the year. Three weeks later it cut more than 200 jobs — about 100 in the Vision Pro organisation, closing a games team and shrinking the immersive video group, and about 100 more across Siri and software engineering. The filing setting Cook's package came eleven days after that. In the same quarter Samsung retook the global smartphone lead with 24% of the market, while worldwide shipments fell 11% to their lowest second-quarter level since 2013.
Forty-five million a year in equity to stop being chief executive. The Siri team shrank while the budget to build Siri grew by a third.
FY27 target remuneration of US$18.5m (NZ$30.9m), up from US$15.2m. Base salary rises to US$640,000 from US$540,000; the long-term incentive and equity opportunity rises to US$17.22m. ~60% vests over three years; the company projects realisable pay of ~US$4.4m.
Debited DR
Share price down roughly 47% over the prior year; 70%+ of shareholders initially opposed the package.
Awarded in the same week the chair explained the company must 'remain competitive'.
An 11% rise, up about A$600,000 on the prior year. Her bonus was cut by A$607,000 over the July outage - which the company said was caused by something within its control - but the salary increase more than offset the reduction.
Debited DR
The 8 July outage left millions unable to connect and hundreds unable to reach Triple Zero, the emergency number. Telstra cut more than 1,200 jobs in the same twelve months, against falling revenue. Further accountability measures were deferred pending an external review.
Her bonus was docked A$607,000. Her pay rose A$600,000.
US$4.63m payable over the two years after her employment ends, set out in a transition agreement filed with the SEC. She stepped down as chief executive on 10 August 2026 and stayed on as an adviser until 9 October. The company also agreed to keep paying for her protective security for a reasonable period after that.
Debited DR
In August 2025 Cracker Barrel replaced a logo that had carried Uncle Herschel — the founder's uncle, in a wicker chair against a barrel — with plain text. The shares fell about 13% in two days, close to US$100m of market value; the company restored the old logo within a week and suspended its remodelling programme in September. Revenue fell 5.7% to US$797.2m in the quarter to 31 October. The quarter after that, comparable sales were down 7% and traffic down 10%, and adjusted EBITDA came in at US$7.2m against US$45.8m a year earlier. Guidance for pre-tax earnings was cut from US$150–190m to US$70–110m. She later said she felt fired by America.
The logo went back up in a week. The four and a half million took two years to pay out, and the bodyguards are still on the company's account.
A £1m signing-on fee paid in July 2026 to a finance chief who had started in April 2025. The statutory ban on water executive bonuses covers performance-related pay to chief executives and finance directors; this was neither new nor performance-related, but a payment already promised, and the company said it could not defer it. The chairman, Sir Adrian Montague, disclosed it in a letter to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and accepted that the public would think it unjust. Across the year to 31 March 2026 Thames paid £4.09m to key management personnel, up from £2.8m.
Debited DR
Thames Water is carrying close to £20bn of debt with cash that does not obviously reach past the end of the year, and nationalisation remains on the table. It is the same company that, a year earlier, paid 21 senior managers out of a £3bn emergency rescue loan and then paused the rest of the scheme when MPs objected.
A bonus ban that stops new bonuses does nothing about the ones already promised.
The long-term incentive plan doubles from 200% to 400% of base salary, worth as much as £3.1m. Counting salary, annual bonus, LTIP and benefits, Jesic could receive up to £4.8m in a single year.
Debited DR
Around 36,000 sewage spills lasting more than 200,000 hours in 2025, and more than 300 pollution incidents in 2024, while customers face higher bills. MPs co-signed a letter urging the company to reconsider, saying it does not feel appropriate while customers face higher water bills and waterways suffer persistent sewage pollution.
Two hundred thousand hours of sewage. The long-term incentive plan was doubled.
£1.9m, including a £1.3m retention award, in the first year of the statutory ban on water executive bonuses. Close to two thirds of the total was paid by a parent company Ofwat does not regulate, rather than by Anglian Water Services, the licensed operator that answers to it.
Debited DR
Anglian was the only water company in England and Wales to record more than 1,000 pollution incidents in both 2024 and 2025.
The bonus ban held. The £500,000 was not called a bonus.
US$38.65m for FY26 — US$1.3m salary, US$28.4m in stock, US$6.5m of incentive pay and US$2.37m of other, including use of the company jet. Up from US$30.53m, and from US$19.86m in FY22. A buyout could add up to US$125m.
Debited DR
305 times the median EA employee's US$126,612, in the year EA restructured Battlefield Studios and laid off staff across four development teams. The company credits the rise to hitting targets on Battlefield 6, EA Sports FC and Skate.
The teams that made the year's best-selling game were cut in the same year it paid for the jet.
A$1.6m, as put to him at a Senate inquiry in February 2026, where he also accepted that one in five G8 centres had received multiple compliance notices.
Debited DR
A former G8 educator was charged with more than seventy sexual offences against eight children under two, at centres where he worked between 2022 and 2023; he had worked at twenty facilities in eight years. In July 2026 the Fair Work Ombudsman took G8 to court over more than A$2m allegedly owed to over 1,400 childcare workers. The group reported a A$38.8m loss for the half year to June.
Two million dollars owed to the people minding the children.
€391,953 for 2025, a rise of about €118,000 — 43% — disclosed in the annual report published on 2 July 2026. No bonus: Irish semi-state chief executives have been barred from taking one since 2011. Bonus payments to staff across the utility rose 36.5% to €17.84m.
Debited DR
The Environmental Protection Agency counted 100 supplies hit by boil-water or restriction notices during 2025, affecting almost 200,000 people, up from 84 the year before, and left 35 plants on its remedial action list with 467,000 people depending on them. Thirteen of Ireland's 190 large urban areas were still treating waste water below the EU standard, Ringsend — which serves the equivalent of more than two million people — among them.
A forty-three per cent rise for the year two hundred thousand people were told to boil it first.
R98.5m of it a buyout award compensating him for unvested Standard Bank equity forfeited on joining. Fixed remuneration was R6.285m, with a R12.15m short-term cash award and an R11.15m share award.
Debited DR
Almost 43% of shareholders voted against the remuneration policy at the AGM. Under South African governance rules any vote of 25% or more compels the company to engage formally with dissenting investors. Shareholders objected to the size, timing and structure, given Fihla had not yet had the chance to show results.
Two thirds of the package rewards work he did for a competitor.
An US$821m long-term award, the second-largest package granted to a US chief executive after Musk's. Multi-year and performance-linked rather than a single year's pay.
Debited DR
Shareholders rejected it, with only 19% in favour — one of the most lopsided repudiations of a sitting chief executive's pay on record. ISS urged investors to vote it down, calling the award extraordinary.
Eighty-one per cent said no. The vote was advisory.
Up to US$448m in five tranches of escalating share-price milestones, structured to keep him in post to September 2030. It pays out fully only if Snowflake's market capitalisation nearly doubles to US$184bn over seven years.
Debited DR
Shareholders gave the pay report about 30% support in 2025. The company ran an outreach campaign in response, then lost the vote again at the June 2026 annual meeting.
They asked the shareholders what was wrong, listened, and lost the vote a second time.
US$151m for the year to July 2023. His FY25 package was US$99.7m, up 72% — more than the chief executives of JPMorgan, Apple or Microsoft, each running a company at least three times Palo Alto's size.
Debited DR
Shareholders have voted down Palo Alto's pay report seven times since 2015, more than any other company in the S&P 500, and rejected it again in 2026 in a year the stock rose 38%. Arora points to an 800% share price gain since 2018.
A settlement of about A$12.09m to end the dispute over a terminated ten-year contract reported at A$100m — A$3m up front and the rest in instalments to 2029. An economist told the ABC the deal was “exceptionally good” for ARN, which is a measure of what the contract would otherwise have cost.
Debited DR
ARN axed the show and made staff redundant across KIIS FM, with employees saying they were blindsided. The company's market value fell below A$100m — less than the face value of the single contract it had signed.
The contract was worth more than the company that signed it.
£4.67m for the year to 31 March 2026, close to double the year before: £1.2m of fixed salary and £3.2m of bonuses, plus pension and benefits. The jump came from a long-term award granted in 2023 and paid on the three years that followed.
Debited DR
Nationwide has no shareholders and sixteen million members, and it did not let them vote on the £2.9bn purchase of Virgin Money — the largest bank merger in Britain since the financial crisis — on the grounds that neither its own rules nor the Building Societies Act required one. Members raised a petition and demanded a special general meeting; the board declined and completed the deal in October 2024. When a customer stood for the board, the first to do so in twenty-four years, the board recommended that members vote against him.
Sixteen million owners, and not one of them had a vote on the biggest thing it ever bought.
£2.6m for 2025, more than double the £1.2m he was paid the year before and the most any Metro Bank chief has been paid since the bank opened in 2010. A separate long-term plan, the Shareholder Value Alignment Plan, could be worth up to £60m to him by the time it ends.
Debited DR
The turnaround that produced the numbers involved more than 1,000 job cuts and closing the branches on Sundays — the seven-day banking the bank was founded on. Ahead of the meeting on 2 June 2026 both ISS and Glass Lewis told shareholders to vote the pay report down, ISS calling the reward structure significantly out of line with the market and objecting that the long-term plan pays out on the share price, which can rise whatever management does.
A bank built on being open on Sunday, closed on Sunday, and the largest pay packet in its history.
2025 package of US$280.8m: US$280.56m in stock awards, US$209,570 of other compensation and an US$80,000 salary. Almost entirely a one-time multi-year performance stock grant approved by the board in September 2024 — the top-ranked US package in Equilar's survey.
Debited DR
Roughly 990 times the US$283,145 he was paid the year before, technically attached to an US$80,000 salary.
The US$80,000 salary is presumably for the days the stock units are resting.
The chief executive's own share of a A$1.24m bonus pool paid to five senior executives; the other four shared A$919,000 between them. Awarded against customer satisfaction, safety and work-culture targets.
Debited DR
Snowy 2.0 is years overdue and its budget has gone from A$2bn to A$12bn — a blowout of roughly A$3m a day. The bonuses were paid in September, a month before Snowy Hydro confirmed the project would exceed even the A$10bn overrun it had already acknowledged. Auditors subsequently found the project was not holding contractors accountable.
Six times over budget and years late, but the customer satisfaction target was met.
₹82.6 crore for FY26: ₹8.5 crore fixed, ₹23.35 crore in bonuses and variable pay, and ₹50.75 crore from exercised restricted stock units.
Debited DR
742 times the median Infosys employee's pay — 289 times excluding the exercised options. Disclosed after layoffs and while the company had still not decided the timing or size of employee pay rises for the following year.
Seven hundred and forty-two times the median. The median's rise was still under review.
US$79,923,350 for 2025 — US$1.8m salary, US$65.7m in stock, US$8.0m in options, US$3.7m of incentive pay and US$714,000 of other. Up 162% from US$30.4m, on a one-off retention award granted in May 2025 to hold the post to at least May 2030.
Debited DR
The pay report drew about 36% support, and Thermo Fisher is a repeat offender — it also failed to win a majority the year before.
Retained at eighty million, against the wishes of two-thirds of the owners.
£426,000 for 2024-25, up £4,000 on the year, with salary alone rising £13,000. The prior year was about £422,000 — a £362,000 salary and £40,000 of pension.
Debited DR
Edinburgh spent £18m on severance in the same year, against a programme of £140m of cuts. Rank-and-file university staff were offered 2%.
Eighteen million spent removing staff. Thirteen thousand more for the vice-chancellor.
The largest of five retention bonuses totalling US$1.075m, all paid on 1 May 2026 and disclosed in a court document. The others went to the chief financial officer (US$225,000), the chief human resources and supply chain officer (US$175,000), the chief revenue officer (US$150,000) and the chief information officer (US$100,000).
Debited DR
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection sixteen days later, on 17 May, owing its top 30 vendors more than US$65m. One of the smaller creditors, a crab-trap maker owed about US$12,000, asked at a bankruptcy hearing whether anyone in the top tier would give a bonus back “to help the group down on the bottom”.
Sixteen days between the retention bonuses and the bankruptcy.
US$29,846,850 for 2025 — a salary of US$587,500 and about US$26.7m in shares. He was paid US$5,016,951 the year before. The package rose roughly sixfold.
Debited DR
Revenue fell 15.6% to US$275.5m, the fourth quarter alone was down 19.7% with an operating loss of US$132.7m, and the shares spent months under a dollar with delisting from Nasdaq in prospect. At the May 2026 meeting 32.1% of votes cast supported the pay report.
Sales down a sixth, share price under a dollar, pay up sixfold.
US$12,904,720 for 2025, most of it in options: US$5,036,021 of option awards and US$2,883,553 of shares on top of a US$1,858,792 salary, a US$1,486,976 incentive payment and US$1,551,203 of other compensation. It was his third consecutive year above US$12.6m.
Debited DR
Chemed owns VITAS, the largest for-profit hospice chain in the country. An intruder sat inside its network from 21 September to 27 October 2025 and took the records of 319,177 current and former patients — social security numbers, medical and insurance details, and the contact details of their next of kin. Class actions followed. VITAS had already paid US$75m in 2017 to settle federal claims that it billed Medicare for patients who were not dying and for levels of care they did not need. At the meeting on 18 May 2026, 38.8% of votes cast supported the pay report.
Three hundred and nineteen thousand dying and dead patients, and their next of kin.
US$26.5m for 2025 against US$6.9m the year before, a rise of 283%, driven by a special equity award on top of the ordinary package.
Debited DR
41.4% of votes cast supported it, one of six US say-on-pay votes to fail outright in the 2026 season. Element Solutions is a US$5bn specialty chemicals company; the award was granted at a scale usually reserved for founders of far larger businesses, and in every one of the six failures that year the objection was to the size of a special grant.
A four-fold pay rise is not a strategy, and the owners said so.
US$373m in stock options and US$26.6m in stock awards, on top of a US$1.1m salary and US$1m bonus, for 2025. About thirteen times the next best-paid US auto chief - GM Mary Barra at US$29.9m and Ford Jim Farley at US$27.5m. In November 2025 the board approved a further package worth up to US$4.6bn over a decade.
Debited DR
Rivian has never made an annual profit and lost US$3.6bn in the year. It sold 42,247 vehicles. Directors justified the award as entirely at-risk, unlocking only on significant share price and financial improvement.
Forty-two thousand cars. Four hundred and three million dollars. Or, as one trade outlet measured it, fifteen Jim Farleys.
Total compensation up almost 32% to nearly €1.6m. Base salary was unchanged at €600,000 — the increase is almost entirely variable pay and bonuses.
Debited DR
Awarded during the 'Back on Track' cost programme, which cuts around 250 office jobs and targets a 5% rise in labour productivity. Dutch finance minister Eelco Heinen called the payouts 'highly inappropriate' given what is being asked of staff and said he would raise it at the next shareholders' meeting; the state holds 5.9% of KLM and 9.1% of Air France-KLM. The FNV union cited the widening gap between executives and employees.
Labour productivity is to rise five per cent. The board did not specify whose labour.
US$28,128,245 for 2025: US$1.8m of salary, US$15.75m in stock, US$4.53m in options, a US$4.97m annual incentive and the rest in pension movement and other compensation. It was the third year running above US$26m, and 275 times what IQVIA's median employee was paid — US$102,424, a median the company reached after excluding staff in a set of countries under the SEC's de minimis rule.
Debited DR
At the annual meeting in Danbury on 23 April 2026, 24.8% of votes cast supported the pay report. A year earlier it had 83%. Six US say-on-pay votes failed outright in the 2026 season and IQVIA's was the weakest of them until Welltower's 19% in June; in every one of the six, an outsized equity award was at the centre of the objection. Three months before the vote IQVIA had guided 2026 profit below what analysts expected and the shares fell 8.5% in a day; JPMorgan cut its price target from US$232 to US$177.
Support fell fifty-eight points in twelve months. The package stood.
US$29,240,930 for the year to 31 January 2026, his last as chief executive and the largest package of his career: US$1.5m of salary, US$4m of incentive pay and about US$21.1m in shares at the value they were granted. Walmart's own proxy puts the median associate on US$30,520 and the ratio at 958:1.
Debited DR
In August 2026 the Government Accountability Office named the employers whose workers rely most on public assistance. Walmart was first in both columns: 16,055 of its employees enrolled in Medicaid across the sampled states, up 55%, and 15,515 on food stamps. Roughly two thirds of the adults on those programmes who work at all work full time. Walmart spent US$8.1bn buying back its own shares in the same period.
The company pays the wage. The public pays the difference.
Reported 2025 compensation of US$205.3m, of which US$202.4m was equity awards, on a salary of US$1.2m. He was paid US$2.63m in 2024, a year in which he received no stock awards.
Debited DR
Seventy-eight times his own pay the year before, and roughly 3,400 years of work at the US median wage.
Semiconductors had a good year. One person had a better one.
£1.9m in salary, pension and benefits, plus a £2.76m annual bonus and a £9.1m long-term share award. Up almost 60% on the previous year — the first year he could receive a full package, his long-term shares having taken three years to vest.
Debited DR
Adjusted earnings fell 22% to US$18.5bn, from US$23.7bn. In the same announcement Shell proposed a pay policy allowing a long-term award of up to nine times salary, a further 50% increase on what the chief executive can receive.
A 22% fall in profit earned a 60% rise in pay. The board's response was to propose making the arithmetic more generous.
₩17.46bn, up 52% in a year, drawn from three companies in the same group: ₩9.01bn from Hyundai Motor, ₩5.4bn from Kia and ₩3.06bn from Hyundai Mobis. Third on South Korea's chaebol pay list, behind Hanwha's Kim Seung-youn on ₩24.84bn and CJ's Lee Jay-hyun on ₩17.7bn.
Debited DR
Seventy times the average Hyundai Motor employee's pay. Across the largest Korean companies the gap widened again, with top executive pay rising faster than the workforce's.
€6,306,458.67 for 2025 after an 11% voluntary waiver, drawn from two payrolls at once: a €1.3m base salary from Volkswagen AG and €1.085m from Porsche AG, plus a €2.002m annual bonus, €1.19m from the 2022–24 long-term plan and a €371,359 Porsche flotation bonus. Pension provision of a further €1.11m sits outside the total.
Debited DR
Volkswagen is cutting up to 100,000 jobs across the group by 2030, the first 50,000 of them in Germany, with a further 5,000 agreed at Porsche in August 2026. Second-quarter operating profit fell almost 10% to €3.5bn and the group abandoned its hope of revenue growth for the year. More than ten thousand workers booed him at the Wolfsburg headquarters; the company's own morale survey put management communication above job security as the workforce's leading grievance. He gave up the Porsche job on 1 January 2026, three years after investors began asking him to.
Two salaries for one man, and a hundred thousand jobs going the other way.
About US$15m for 2025, up 57% on US$6.4m the year before: a salary of US$1,147,363, a US$3.1m bonus, US$6,763,720 of restricted shares and US$266,917 of other pay. The share award was mostly a one-off grant of 207,862 shares described as special recognition.
Debited DR
GEO and CoreCivic together booked US$1.4bn of quarterly revenue in the spring of 2026 as immigration detention approached record levels; ICE contracts alone are 48% of GEO's revenue. 2026 is the deadliest year in immigration detention since the Department of Homeland Security was created. Of the 38 people who died in ICE custody from the start of 2025 to 1 February 2026, 71% were held in for-profit facilities.
Special recognition, in the deadliest year the system has had.
A £1.4m annual bonus and £2.2m in long-term share awards for 2025, on top of a £1.04m salary, which rises 3% to £1.13m from April. His total package was £4.73m, down from £5.08m in 2024. Pay ratio to the average Centrica employee: 71:1.
Debited DR
Underlying earnings nearly halved, to £814m from £1.55bn. The household supply arm's earnings fell 39% to £163m, including an £80m hit from unusually warm weather.
O'Shea once said there was 'no point' trying to justify his £8.2m package. He has not attempted to justify this one either.
€7.5m for 2025, up from €5.8m the year before. A remuneration policy put to shareholders in February 2026 would lift the maximum from €8.3m to €12.5m, almost all of the increase in variable pay.
Debited DR
Staff at Gall & Gall, the off-licence chain Ahold Delhaize owns, rejected the company's final offer — 2% in May 2026, 1% in December, and the Sunday allowance halved, which the FNV union called a cigar from your own box — and struck through May, June and July, closing dozens of shops. Etos, another Ahold chain, had settled at 3.5% with no cut to conditions. Gall & Gall employs about 1,800 people; one year of his pay is about €4,200 for each of them.
The ceiling rose by four million while the shop floor was offered two per cent and lost half the Sunday rate.
What Elliott retained in long-term incentives after the board cut bonuses for current and former management. He sued for a further A$13.5m of withheld incentives, then discontinued the action in February 2026, forgoing that and up to A$8m of future variable pay. ANZ says nothing was given in exchange for dropping the case.
Debited DR
ANZ agreed to pay a A$240m civil penalty to regulators for systemic failures. Nearly a third of shareholders voted against the remuneration report at the December 2025 AGM, a second strike in two years. Proxy advisers said the cuts should have gone further.
The board called it accountability. The proxy advisers called it insufficient. Both were describing the same A$7.9m.
An accelerated cash bonus of US$1.47m plus a US$5.25m retention award, paid by 31 December 2025. Structured partly to limit golden-parachute tax under IRC sections 280G and 4999, in exchange for giving up future cash severance.
Debited DR
Awarded to retain a chief executive to wind the company up. The board approved a Plan of Sale and Liquidation in November 2025; stockholders approved a payout of US$1.45 per share.
A retention award, for staying until there is nothing left to stay for.
Up to US$1tn in stock over a decade if Tesla hits milestones ending at an US$8.5tn market cap. Board-valued at ~US$88b; approved with 75% shareholder support. Separately, the AFL-CIO's 2026 Executive Paywatch put what Musk actually realised in 2025 at US$158.3bn — 2.5 million times the pay of the median Tesla worker.
Debited DR
Even at the board's conservative valuation, roughly what every other S&P 500 chief executive combined was paid in a year, per Glass Lewis. Against the realised figure the comparison stops working altogether: the median S&P 500 chief executive was on US$17.3m in the same year, and the average chief-executive-to-worker ratio was 312:1 — a ratio Paywatch has to compute with Musk excluded.
The largest pay package in corporate history, announced on stage with dancing robots. Too large to draw on the scale page, so it has one of its own.
A US$60,000 bonus plus US$12,000 in cost-of-living adjustment, approved 10-4. Her contract allowed up to US$80,000 and the board settled on 75% of it. DART paid more than US$2.4m in executive bonuses between 2020 and 2024 while executive headcount grew from 47 to 74 and their combined base salaries rose from US$8.1m to US$14.6m.
Debited DR
Two months earlier DART made the largest service cuts in its history, citing a shortfall of US$42-43m. Several member cities including Plano were considering withdrawing from the system. Irving mayor Rick Stopfer, a board member, opposed the bonus and cited low ridership.
The largest service cuts in the agency's history came in September. The bonus came in November. Nadine Lee announced her departure the following year.
Statutory FY25 remuneration of A$9,659,585, from Table 14 of the company's own annual report. A$6,166,437 of it is a single line the company describes as a cash sign-on bonus in lieu of his FY25 long-term incentive, his FY25 short-term incentive, and an accrual for FY26. The report puts the performance-related share of the total at 8%.
Debited DR
Star posted a statutory net loss after tax of A$427.9m for the year, following a A$1,684.6m loss the year before. No dividend was declared or paid. More than 40% of votes were cast against the remuneration report at the AGM, a first strike, and the company conceded the pay structure was not in line with typical market practice. McCann resigned with immediate effect on 16 December 2025, about 17 months into the job.
Eight per cent of it was performance related. The A$91,337 of car parking, accommodation, airfares and travel was not.
A 14% increase to base salary, from £590,000, before other benefits.
Debited DR
Staff were given 3.5% in the same round. The new salary is 18 times the company's median employee pay, at a company under a statutory bonus ban following criminal pollution convictions.
Fourteen per cent for one. Three and a half for everyone else.
R79.8m for the 2025 financial year, in a year he was entitled to no short-term incentive at all. The total was carried by the final instalment of a one-off R38.8m sign-on share allocation granted when he joined. Like-for-like pay fell 27%, to R41m from R56.1m.
Debited DR
The remuneration committee chair confirmed no short-term incentive was payable because neither the financial nor the strategic trigger had been met. The performance award was forfeited in full; the joining award paid out on schedule, because it was never conditional on performance.
The bonus for performing was forfeited. The bonus for arriving was not.
The final two instalments of a US$15m annual bonus, paid in August 2025 at Chu's own direction to the CFO. Prosecutors say part of it bought a multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills property.
Debited DR
Within days of the payments more than 1,000 employees were placed on unpaid leave. The company filed for bankruptcy on 10 September 2025. The indictment alleges roughly US$800m in bogus collateral created by double-pledging assets.
2024 pay. Base salary fell to US$800,000 but bonuses and incentives rose 15%, including US$200,000 for achieving non-financial goals such as quality and service scores. She voluntarily declined half her bonus.
Debited DR
UCare posted a US$504m operating loss in 2024. State officials took over the nonprofit health plan in December and it moved toward shutdown, with a further 102 jobs cut as liquidation continued; the remaining business was sold to rival Medica on 1 January. The company attributed the failure to low Medicaid reimbursement rates.
The plan lost US$397 for every dollar it paid her.
Up 20% to a record ¥1.95bn for the year to March, the fourth consecutive record. Roughly double the pay of Koji Sato, the man actually running the company as chief executive. Toyota attributes the rise to global pay benchmarking.
Debited DR
Awarded on falling profit and after a run of vehicle certification and safety-testing scandals. Support for his re-election fell to 85% from 96% in 2022, the lowest since at least 2010, with CalPERS, CalSTRS and New York City's pension system voting against him.
Twice the chief executive's pay, for not being chief executive.
US$60,938,062 for 2025, almost all of it a single US$60,000,024 stock option award made when he returned to the job he had left in 2017. Salary for the part-year came to US$596,154. ISS told investors the award raised significant concern and carried no performance-vesting criteria at all; they approved it anyway at the June meeting.
Debited DR
He returned to a company under federal criminal and civil investigation over how it codes patients in Medicare Advantage, the line of business that carries its margins. A federal judge has let a class action proceed alleging UnitedHealth used an algorithm rather than clinicians to decide post-acute care claims, with denials that plaintiffs say worsened patients' health and in some cases killed them. In January 2026 two senators reopened an inquiry into reports that at least three nursing home residents died after the company delayed or refused their care.
Sixty million dollars, no performance conditions, at the exact moment performance was the question.
Each of 21 senior executives, Management retention scheme
Credited CR
£881k avg
One share of an £18.5m retention scheme for 21 senior managers. The company never itemised the split, which tracked base salary. £2.46m was paid on 30 April 2025 at 50% of base salary; the remaining tranches were paused in May after the EFRA Committee's intervention.
Debited DR
Paid out of a £3bn emergency loan raised to rescue the utility from financial collapse, amid sewage spills and a possible nationalisation.
The chair told MPs the board 'does not intend to recover this money'. The sewage, presumably, also stays where it landed.
Share options that unlocked when Ryanair's share price held above €21. He must stay as chief executive until 2028 to exercise them, at a strike price of €11.12. A second grant followed on 19 June 2026: another 10 million options at €26.70, which pay out only if he stays to April 2032 and the airline either passes €4bn of post-tax profit or holds €42 a share for 28 trading days. At that share price the second grant alone is worth about €153m.
Debited DR
Unions called the award morally questionable given the airline's record on cabin crew and pilot pay. Barclays analysts noted that the share buyback which helped lift the price was approved by a board on which O'Leary sits.
He compared it to a footballer's wages. Footballers do not approve their own transfer fees.
The highest-paid director, Reported to be Raman Bhatia, chief executive
Credited CR
£1.7m
£1.7m in total, including a £600,000 bonus signed off by the remuneration committee for the year to March 2025. The annual report names only the highest-paid director; reporting at the time identified the chief executive, Raman Bhatia. A further £5.4m in bonuses went to the rest of the board, and bank-wide bonuses rose from £5.3m to £24.6m — close to fivefold.
Debited DR
The Financial Conduct Authority had fined Starling £29m in October 2024 over financial crime controls it called shockingly lax, saying the bank had left the financial system wide open to criminals and people under sanctions. In the same results Starling wrote off £28m on Covid bounce-back loans, conceding it had lent public-guaranteed money to businesses without proper checks. Pre-tax profit fell 26%.
Fined for not checking who it was lending to, then paid out five times the bonuses.
US$24.6m for 2024, up 14% on US$21.5m. His 2025 package reached US$27.6m, his second largest since taking over in 2019.
Debited DR
269 times the median Pfizer employee. Awarded through the continued collapse of the COVID vaccine business and a public proxy fight with Starboard Value, which pointed to Pfizer trailing the NYSE Arca Pharma index by 132 points in the second half of 2024.
Two hundred and sixty-nine times the median, for trailing the index.
C$12.82m for 2024, including an annual bonus of nearly C$2.4m. It was down from C$13.43m in 2023, the bonus having fallen about a fifth. His target pay was frozen rather than cut, and frozen again for 2025.
Debited DR
In February 2024 BCE cut 4,800 jobs, its largest reduction in thirty years, and raised its dividend the same day. The prime minister called the decision a garbage decision. Bibic was summoned before a Commons committee to account for it. Another 1,200 jobs went in 2025, the year the dividend was finally cut.
Four thousand eight hundred people lost their jobs and the dividend went up the same morning.
DKK18.9m for 2024, including a DKK2.0m cash bonus. A further DKK16.3m followed across the resignation period to January 2026.
Debited DR
The exit was to arrest a slump that had taken 83% off the share price since its 2021 peak. Ørsted's market value fell from US$93.9bn to US$15.1bn over the four-year tenure.
Ninety-four billion of market value became fifteen. The severance was paid monthly for a year.
US$96m for roughly four months of 2024 — ~94% stock awards, partly replacing forfeited Chipotle equity — plus a US$5m sign-on bonus paid at his one-month anniversary.
Debited DR
6,666 times the median Starbucks worker's US$14,674, for a third of a year, ahead of announced job cuts — the widest ratio of any company in the S&P 500, per the AFL-CIO.
Works out near US$800,000 a day. The company also covered his jet commute from Southern California; relocation to Seattle was not required.
£693,000 from parent company YTL Utilities (UK), including a £170,000 bonus paid despite the government ban. Ofwat accepted it as lawful because it related to a different part of the parent's business.
Debited DR
The ban was imposed on Wessex after criminal pollution convictions in November 2024, over a sewage pumping station failure that killed more than 2,000 fish.
Banned from taking a bonus at the water company. Paid one by its owner.
The average bonus per executive in 2025, out of C$10.3m paid across the executive ranks. Every executive took one. The figures came out of access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, not from a disclosure the company chose to make.
Debited DR
VIA Rail's trains ran on time 35% of the time that year, and the federal government put in C$376m to cover its operating losses.
Thirty-five per cent of trains on time. One hundred per cent of executives on a bonus.
Severance worth up to US$10m — 18 months of his US$1.25m base salary, 1.5 times a target bonus set at 275% of salary, and about US$3.15m of pro-rated 2024 bonus. He earned at least US$46m across his tenure.
Debited DR
Intel announced 15,000 job cuts in August 2024, more than 15% of its staff, and reduced employee benefits as part of a US$10bn savings plan. He was removed four months later.
The savings plan reached the benefits before it reached the severance.
US$12,976,050 for 2024, from the health plan's own Form 990: base pay of US$2,195,616 and a bonus of US$9,348,865, with the rest in other and non-taxable benefits. Five more executives were on over US$3.8m each. The organisation is a nonprofit and files as one.
Debited DR
About 2,400 of the plan's mental health clinicians in Southern California — therapists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses and social workers — walked out in October 2024 and stayed out for 196 days, the longest strike by mental health workers in American history. They were asking for the pension Kaiser had withdrawn and for pay to catch up after years without cost-of-living rises; patients went without therapy for most of it, and the strike did not end until May 2025. The year before, 75,000 Kaiser staff had struck in the largest healthcare walkout the country had seen.
The bonus on its own was nine million dollars. The therapists were asking for their pension back.
US$12,257,636 for 2024 on the system's own return: base pay of US$2,928,934 and a bonus of US$7,307,997.
Debited DR
In February 2024 Providence agreed to refund or write off US$157.7m after Washington's attorney general sued it — the largest resolution of its kind in the country. It forgave US$137.2m of debt for about 65,000 patients and refunded US$20.6m to about 34,000 more. The state alleged that between 2018 and 2023 the nonprofit had trained staff to press for payment from patients who qualified for free care, and had sent Medicaid patients to debt collectors.
A charity that trained its staff to chase the patients entitled to free care.
A US$3.8m cash retention award approved by the board on 12 November 2024, part of US$5.4m handed to named executives that week — US$850,000 to the chief operating officer, US$300,000 to the chief information officer. Payable for staying another year.
Debited DR
Six days later Spirit filed for Chapter 11. About 230 pilots had already been furloughed that January and 270 more followed in November. Christie left in April 2025, months short of the date that would have secured the money. Spirit filed a second Chapter 11 in August 2025, and when it wound down in 2026 — staff losing pay and benefits, a class action following over the abruptness of the layoffs — its executives went to the bankruptcy court asking for US$10.7m more in retention pay.
Paid to stay. Filed for bankruptcy six days later. Left before the money vested.
Disclosed as an additional payment in the annual report filed with the NZX alongside full-year earnings. The company says it was contractual on termination, negotiated when he joined, and included holiday pay and a discretionary three months notice in lieu.
Debited DR
A half-year loss of NZ$23.7m driven by writedowns on Torpedo7, the outdoor goods business the company sold for NZ$1 having invested NZ$52.2m in it. TheMarket, its separate online site, was closed after no buyer could be found. Grayston was hired from Sears in 2016 to lift sales, shareholder returns and the online business; the tenure instead ran through restructurings, a failed consumer finance venture, asset writedowns and erratic earnings.
He was paid NZ$2.2m to leave. Torpedo7 sold for a dollar.
2023 total compensation of US$32.8m, up from US$22.6m in 2022 — the highest package in Boeing's history — driven by about US$30m in stock grants. Retirement payouts were valued at a further US$45m in stock awards and options vesting over time.
Debited DR
Voted through months after a fuselage panel blew out mid-flight, with the stock down ~29% and a DOJ fraud review in the headlines.
He declined the US$2.8m annual incentive bonus after the door blew off. The other US$32.8m stayed bolted on.
2023 package worth up to €36.5m (US$38.8m), a 56% rise year on year; approved by ~70% in a consultative shareholder vote.
Debited DR
Awarded while the carmaker cut costs and workforce for its EV transition. Glass Lewis, ISS and Proxinvest all recommended voting it down; it passed on 70% support, a thinner margin than the year before.
He compared his contract to a footballer's or an F1 driver's. Neither of those gets to restructure the stadium.
£16.9m for 2023 — base pay of £1.43m, an annual bonus of £2.8m and long-term incentives worth about £12.3m — up from £15.3m in 2022, making him the best-paid chief executive in the FTSE 100. A further increase was put to the 2024 AGM.
Debited DR
Proxy adviser Glass Lewis called the proposed increase 'excessive'.
A top-20 shareholder's rebuttal: he is 'massively underpaid'. Somewhere, a nurse doing a double shift agrees to disagree.
US$69.3m of severance after he was removed in April 2024, disclosed in Paramount's filings: US$6.2m of salary continuation, US$24.8m of bonus continuation, a US$10.36m pro-rata bonus for the year he was fired, US$27.81m of accelerated equity, US$88,160 of insurance and US$25,000 of outplacement help. It took his total for 2024 to US$86.96m, against US$31.3m the year before.
Debited DR
He had opened that same year by cutting 800 jobs, and by the end of it Paramount had shed 15% of its US workforce and booked US$500m of annual run-rate savings. The three co-chief executives who replaced him were put on packages around US$20m each, and their contracts let them resign with severance if they were demoted.
Sixty-nine million dollars for the year the cutting started, paid for stopping.
A £183,000 bonus for 2023 on top of a £325,000 salary. He told MPs he had 'reflected' before accepting it.
Debited DR
P&O Ferries sacked 786 British seafarers without notice in March 2022 and replaced them with agency crew, some paid as little as £4.87 an hour. He admitted to Parliament that the company had broken the law deliberately.
£4.87 an hour for the replacements. £183,000 for the man who chose them.
CHF14.4m for nine months' work after being brought back to run the Credit Suisse integration — the best-paid bank chief executive in Europe. UBS called it recognition of 'excellent performance in a defining year'.
Debited DR
Paid while UBS cut the combined bonus pool 14%, to US$4.5bn from US$5.3bn, and stripped Credit Suisse executives of theirs entirely. Swiss finance minister Karin Keller-Sutter said the sum exceeded 'the imagination of any normal citizen'; the upper house of parliament then backed a motion to cap banker pay at CHF3m to CHF5m.
Parliament responded by trying to make the number illegal.
US$13.4m for 2023, up 37% from US$9.8m, including more than US$10m of stock and option awards. He missed all six annual incentive targets covering financial performance, customer service and safety.
Debited DR
A Norfolk Southern train derailed at East Palestine, Ohio in February 2023, releasing vinyl chloride and forcing evacuations. Operating income fell more than 40%, including a US$1.1bn hit from the derailment. An 'East Palestine Adjustment' lifted his performance stock payout from 56% to 96.3% of target.
The derailment had its own line in the bonus calculation. It raised the payout.
US$666,473 for 2023, which made him the best-paid charity employee in Texas that year. The organisation paid him about US$1.5m across 2020 to 2022.
Debited DR
He ran the organisation through a bankruptcy filed in February 2020 to deal with more than 82,000 claims of childhood sexual abuse, which ended in a US$2.46bn settlement — the largest fund of its kind in American history. A judge approved it in 2022 and the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge in January 2026.
Eighty-two thousand claims, and the man running it was the best-paid charity employee in the state.
US$907,923 in total compensation for 2023 and US$742,181 for 2024 — more than US$1.6m across the two years. The charity says her base salary held at about US$405,000 and that the rest was unused vacation accumulated across a forty-year tenure and paid out in a lump.
Debited DR
1736 Family Crisis Center runs domestic violence shelters and homelessness services in Los Angeles on public money. The Los Angeles Times compared her pay with the leaders of sixteen other Los Angeles County nonprofits doing the same work and found a median of about US$160,000. It also reported that she has kept her primary home in Hawaii for years while running the organisation.
Forty years of unused holiday, cashed out by a charity for people with nowhere to sleep.
A$10.4m for the 2023 financial year on a base salary of A$2.5m — A$3.4m more than the year before, and more than the job has paid in any year since: A$9m in 2024, A$9.1m in 2026. He took half of the short-term cash bonus available to him.
Debited DR
The bank made a record A$10.2bn cash profit that year, which it attributed mainly to a 0.17 percentage point widening of its net interest margin — the gap between what it pays savers and charges borrowers — as rates rose. Its own provision for bad debts rose A$1.47bn over the same twelve months, which it attributed to rising rates and cost-of-living pressure on those same borrowers. It closed 73 branches, and stopped closing regional ones only after a Senate inquiry into the 1,600 shut across regional and rural Australia in six years asked it to.
The margin that made the record was the gap between the savers and the borrowers.
A US$625,000 retention payment in July 2023, one of about US$4.6m paid to eight serving and two former executives in the weeks before the company filed. The chief operating officer took US$1.08m and the chief restructuring officer US$1m.
Debited DR
Yellow had 30,000 employees. It shut its doors and dismissed all of them, closing the largest trucking bankruptcy in US history, with a US$700m federal pandemic loan still outstanding. The payments were made so that the people running it would not leave before the liquidation was done.
Thirty thousand jobs, and a bonus for being last out of the building.
€345,000 paid between 2017 and 2022 on top of the salary RTÉ published. Payments for 2020 to 2022 ran through a UK barter account operated by the agency Astus.
Debited DR
The arrangement kept his declared earnings below €500,000 while his actual earnings went above it, at a public broadcaster funded by a compulsory licence fee. Director general Dee Forbes resigned four days after the disclosure.
The declared figure was under half a million. That was the point of the arrangement.
A C$1.2m rise to C$11.79m for 2022, after consultants hired by the family-controlled company determined he was underpaid. The chief financial officer's pay went from C$1.8m to C$5.4m in the same year.
Debited DR
Awarded during record food inflation, while Weston was being called before a parliamentary subcommittee on grocery prices. A consumer boycott of Loblaw followed.
The consultants were hired by the company. They found he was underpaid.
Shares sold on 27 February 2023, eleven days before the bank failed — part of US$29.5m of stock sold over two years. He said the trade followed a pre-set plan, filed on 26 January.
Debited DR
Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on 10 March 2023, the largest US bank failure since 2008. Senator Sherrod Brown told him: 'You were paying out bonuses until literally hours before regulators seized your assets.'
The plan was filed in January. The bank failed in March.
€500,000 in severance on leaving the board of the state-owned airline. Portugal's finance inspectorate later found she should return €450,110 of it, on the basis that she resigned and was not entitled to severance at all.
Debited DR
She had just been appointed a secretary of state, and resigned that post within a month. Infrastructure minister Pedro Nuno Santos resigned over the affair, citing how it looked during a cost-of-living crisis, and the government dismissed TAP's chief executive and chairman in March 2023.
Half a million to leave a state airline, on the way into a government job that lasted a month.
CHF3.6m for 2022 in FIFA's own annual report: CHF1.9m of base salary, CHF1.6m of variable pay awarded for the World Cup year and paid the year after, and a CHF24,000 allowance. The variable half was more than US$1m up on the last World Cup year. His pay has gone on rising since — CHF4.8m for 2025, against about CHF1.5m when he was elected in 2016.
Debited DR
The tournament was built by migrant labour. The Guardian reported in 2021 that 6,500 workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had died in Qatar in the decade after it won the bid, from all causes; the ILO recorded 50 work-related deaths and more than 500 severe injuries in Qatar in 2020 alone. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch asked FIFA to set up a remedy fund for the dead and injured and for wage theft, matching the US$440m of prize money. FIFA announced a Legacy Fund instead, with nothing in it for workers, and Infantino said Qatar's own insurance fund would deal with it. Human Rights Watch was still reporting no remedy a year later. FIFA took about US$7.5bn from the cycle.
The prize money was four hundred and forty million. The workers who built it were offered nothing.
US$3,305,259, on the return for the year to August 2023, his last. Three other officers were paid over US$800,000.
Debited DR
The Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA nine votes to nil in June 2021, in a case brought by athletes over the cap on what they could be given. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that the association's traditions “cannot justify the NCAA's decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated”, and that “nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate”.
Nine justices to none, on an enterprise built on people it would not pay.
US$1,171,699 for 2022, on the association's own return. Three other officers took between US$498,000 and US$854,000.
Debited DR
A New York jury found in February 2024 that he had corruptly run the organisation, causing it about US$5.4m of harm through private jet travel, holidays, no-show contracts and other spending, and ordered him to repay US$4,351,231 of it. He was barred from serving as an officer or director. The attorney general had sued over the handling of charitable funds.
The jury put the number on it: four million, three hundred and fifty-one thousand.
US$6,903,089 for 2022, up from US$5,591,406 the year before, at a foundation that asks the public for donations.
Debited DR
Mozilla had cut a quarter of its staff — 250 people — in August 2020, blaming the pandemic, and Firefox's share of the browser market went on falling throughout. An analysis of its accounts found about 30% of all spending going on administration. She stood down as chief executive in February 2024, and more redundancies followed.
The browser kept losing users. The pay kept going up.
R$55m for 2021, the second-largest chief executive package among the 90 companies on Brazil's Ibovespa. The appointment came after the Brumadinho collapse, not before it.
Debited DR
Vale's dam at Brumadinho failed in January 2019, killing 270 people under 12 million cubic metres of tailings. In the two years after, the company paid shareholders US$3.63bn and those affected by the disaster US$686.9m. Victims said the compensation fell far short.
Three point six billion to shareholders. Six hundred and eighty-seven million to the people downstream.
US$17.8m for the 2021 financial year, up 57% on the year before.
Debited DR
Demand collapsed as lockdowns ended and the share price fell away with it. Activist investor Blackwells Capital called for his removal and for the company to be sold. He stepped down as chief executive in February 2022.
Awarded by a Madrid court after Santander withdrew its offer to make him chief executive in a dispute over his pay. He never worked a day in the job.
Debited DR
Santander agreed with unions to close about 1,150 branches and cut some 4,000 jobs in Spain, roughly a tenth of its Spanish workforce, across the period in which it was litigating over the pay of a chief executive it never hired.
Sixty-eight million euros for a job he did not start.
US$35,462,873, on the return CommonSpirit filed for the year to June 2022. More than twice what Ascension paid the chief executive of a system of comparable size, and the largest single-year figure this register holds for a tax-exempt body.
Debited DR
CommonSpirit lost US$1.85bn over the following year. Between 16 September and 3 October 2022 it was held to ransom by attackers who took the records of 623,774 patients; the hospitals ran on paper, and patients sued the system for failing to follow its own security policies.
Thirty-five million dollars, at an organisation whose entire legal basis is not making a profit.
US$13,707,694, on the return for the year to June 2022. Four more executives took over US$5.2m each.
Debited DR
The New York Times reported in December 2022 that Ascension had spent years cutting staffing to improve margins while sitting on about US$18bn of cash. At a hospital outside Chicago there were so few nurses that one aide was left with 32 infected patients and psychiatric patients waited a full day for a bed; outside Flint, patients were left lying in dried faeces and robots were brought in to replace the aides who had sat with confused ones. Inspectors cited the chain over untreated bed sores. A ransomware attack in May 2024 then took out its records system for weeks across 5.6m patients, and staff described lost lab results and medication errors.
Eighteen billion in the bank, and one aide for thirty-two patients.
Over US$6m for 2021 on the system's Form 990, out of US$44m shared by its 28 best-paid people. The following year's return put him near US$12m.
Debited DR
The New York Times reported in September 2022 that Bon Secours was using Richmond Community Hospital — a stripped-down building with no intensive care unit, in a poor and mostly Black neighbourhood, founded in 1907 by Black doctors — to claim federal 340B drug discounts, then spending the proceeds on facilities in wealthier and whiter parts of the city. The hospital was among the most profitable in Virginia. The Senate health committee opened an inquiry into how nonprofit hospitals spend that money.
The poorest hospital in the chain was the most profitable thing in it.
US$81.5m of a US$111m distribution taken out of Steward in 2021 — not salary but the operator's own share of a payout he was in a position to authorise. The bankruptcy estate's trustee is suing to claw it back, part of a US$3.4bn action filed in December 2025 alleging the company was already insolvent when the money went out.
Debited DR
Steward filed the largest for-profit hospital bankruptcy in American history in May 2024. Hospitals closed, staff were laid off and patients died; emergency departments ran so short that staff bought nappies and Pedialyte from a convenience store, while land was sold out from under the buildings. He bought a US$40m yacht and a US$15m sport-fishing boat. Subpoenaed to explain it, he did not appear, and in September 2024 the Senate voted unanimously to hold him in criminal contempt of Congress.
The first hospital chief executive in living memory to be held in contempt of Congress for declining to explain the money.
A San Francisco judge gave final approval in August 2021 to a US$575m antitrust settlement, after unions, self-funded employers and the California attorney general accused Sutter of using its dominance in northern California to overcharge. The claim put the overcharging at US$756m. Sutter had barred insurers from telling employers what its care cost before they were billed for it, and forced all-or-nothing contracts that took in its dearer and poorer hospitals along with the rest. It accepted ten years of court monitoring.
2020 grant-year pay: US$797.9m in stock options plus US$296.4m in stock awards atop a US$1.1m salary, disclosed in the year Palantir listed.
Debited DR
An 8,991% increase on the US$12.1m he was paid the year before.
By 2024 the same equity had ballooned so far that the SEC's 'compensation actually paid' line read US$6.8b. Palantir's footnote insists that isn't real money.
2020 pay and long-term incentives of £13.3m, up from £7.1m the year before — the largest package of his career, in the year he was forced out. He forfeited about £2.7m of bonuses over the destruction.
Debited DR
Rio Tinto blew up two 46,000-year-old Aboriginal rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara to expand an iron ore mine. More than 60% of votes were cast against the remuneration report at the 2021 AGM. The vote was advisory and the payment stood.
Forty-six thousand years, ended for an iron ore expansion. His best-paid year followed.
US$245m in stock and US$200m in cash, under a renegotiated exit settlement with SoftBank.
Debited DR
WeWork's valuation fell from US$47bn to about US$8bn. Staff who had been told 'we over me' held options worth close to nothing. The company filed for bankruptcy in November 2023.
US$246.6m for 2021, more than six times the US$37.7m of the year before. US$202.9m of it was option awards, under a contract signed in May 2021 and running to the end of 2027, written to keep him in place through the merger with AT&T's WarnerMedia.
Debited DR
Discovery had promised Wall Street hundreds of millions in cost savings from combining the two companies. The savings came out of jobs: the merger was followed by thousands of redundancies. As You Sow later ranked him the most overpaid chief executive in the United States.
Six times his own previous year, for a merger whose savings came out of other people's jobs.
US$10.5m on resigning in August 2020 — US$2.5m over two years and US$8m of retirement — under a contract he had signed in July 2019. He argued he was owed it because no wrongdoing had been formally found. Later reporting put what Liberty paid him altogether at about US$15.5m.
Debited DR
In March 2024 the Department of Education fined Liberty US$14m for breaking the Clery Act, the largest such fine ever levied, after a two-year investigation found a systemic and persistent failure to report campus crime and a pattern of administrators discouraging victims of sexual violence from coming forward. The conduct it examined ran through the years he was president.
Ten and a half million on the way out, and a record fine for what the students were not told.
SEK26.6m of termination benefits paid in 2019, taking her total for the year to SEK30.7m. A further 18 months' severance, about SEK21.5m, was cancelled in March 2020 after the bank's own law firm reported on her failures.
Debited DR
She was removed an hour before the annual meeting over the bank's handling of money laundering through its Baltic branches, and was later indicted for gross fraud over her public statements about those controls.
Removed an hour before the shareholders could ask.
US$281m for 2019, almost all of it a stock award granted on his promotion to chief executive of Alphabet at the end of that year.
Debited DR
Alphabet agreed to pay US$310m to settle shareholder litigation over how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against executives, and to stop paying severance to anyone fired for misconduct or under investigation for it. That litigation followed reporting on a US$90m exit package for one executive and a further US$15m for another, and a worldwide staff walkout.
The company paid US$310m to settle how it handled the payouts. He was paid US$281m.
US$9.49m for 2019, on the return of a charity that is Pennsylvania's largest employer outside government. Thirty-two of its people were paid over US$1m. Across 2016 to 2022 the system paid him about US$63m, and about US$18m more in deferred compensation in 2023, two years after he had left.
Debited DR
UPMC pays no property tax on much of its estate as a charity, in a city that has repeatedly challenged whether it should. Over the same years it closed hospitals, including UPMC Braddock in a former steel town, fought the unionisation of its own service workers, and outsourced jobs while raising what it charged patients.
Pennsylvania's largest private employer, and a charity for tax purposes.
About US$105m in cash and equity, granted by the board that had just dismissed him for a relationship with an employee. His agreement said he would forfeit the package on a finding of detrimental conduct; the board treated the dismissal as without cause, and the awards kept running.
Debited DR
McDonald's sued him in August 2020 after finding he had lied during its investigation, deleted evidence from his phone, and had had three further relationships with employees, one of them approved for a share grant worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He returned the entire US$105m in December 2021 — the largest clawback of its kind — and the SEC fined him US$400,000 in January 2023 for misleading investors about why he had gone.
Dismissed for cause, paid as though he had not been, and it took a lawsuit and two years to get it back.
£2.2m in bonuses between 2012 and 2019, part of more than £3.7m of total pay over six years. Her final year alone was £717,000, including £390,000 of bonuses on a £255,000 salary.
Debited DR
Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office prosecuted 736 subpostmasters on evidence from the faulty Horizon accounting system. People were imprisoned and bankrupted. She returned her CBE in January 2024 after more than a million people signed a petition.
Seven hundred and thirty-six prosecutions. Two point two million in bonuses.
A €7m package for 2018, as the management board took bonuses for the first time in four years — among the best paid in European banking at the time.
Debited DR
The bank's wider bonus pool fell 14% that year, partly because of job cuts, and the investment bank's pool was cut about 30% the following year. Unions feared the mooted Commerzbank merger would cost up to 30,000 jobs.
€7.24m for 2019, up 56.1% on the year and the largest package paid to any manager in Austria. More than €1m of the rise was a function allowance for taking interim charge of the Marketing and Trading division from July.
Debited DR
Reporting by Dossier put roughly €400,000 of company money into private flights alone since 2016, at a part state-owned oil and gas group.
More than US$80m of deferred compensation that prosecutors and Nissan's own investigation say he failed to disclose, accumulated over nine years with no plan for how it would be paid. Figures are allegations.
Debited DR
He was arrested in Tokyo in November 2018 and held for 108 days. He jumped bail in 2019, fled to Lebanon, and remains a fugitive. He has never stood trial.
What he took from a long-term incentive plan after giving up about £25m under pressure from investors and MPs. The original award was reported at between £100m and £128m depending on the share price used. The scheme as a whole was set to pay more than £800m to 150 senior employees, and had no cap.
Debited DR
More than half of Persimmon's sales went through Help to Buy, the taxpayer-backed loan scheme launched in 2013, which lifted the share price the award was keyed to. The chairman, Nicholas Wrigley, and the senior independent director, Jonathan Davie, both resigned in December 2017, acknowledging the scheme “could have included a cap”. Fairburn left in November 2018 after a shareholder rebellion, having walked out of a television interview when asked about the money.
A scheme to help people buy homes, and a bonus scaled to the share price it lifted.
£5.8m, agreed in July 2017 when his contract running GLS, Royal Mail's European parcels arm, was renegotiated, and paid as he moved up to run the group in June 2018. The chair of the Commons business committee called it a transfer fee. It appeared as a note on page 144 of the accounts rather than in the remuneration report. His basic salary was £640,000, 17% more than his predecessor Moya Greene's £548,000, against a package that could reach £2.7m a year.
Debited DR
Seventy per cent of shareholders voted against the remuneration report at the 2018 annual meeting. The average Royal Mail worker earned £28,274 that year, so the package came to more than a hundred times theirs; the CWU called the arrangements obscene, after years in which the workforce had lost thousands of jobs to modernisation and accepted cuts to their defined-benefit pensions. He ran the company from his house on Lake Zurich, and left in May 2020 with nine monthly payments totalling £480,000, up to £50,000 of legal fees and £25,000 of outplacement support — announced alongside the news that executive directors would take no bonus for the year and that £25m had been set aside for frontline staff during the pandemic.
A transfer fee, to move one man from one part of the company to another.
US$7.7m in the year he was pushed out, more than three times his pay the year before, and enough to have made him the best-paid university president in the country had he still held the job. USC paid him a further US$5.2m the following year.
Debited DR
He resigned in May 2018 after 200 professors signed a letter saying he had failed to grasp the damage done by George Tyndall, the campus gynaecologist accused of assaulting and harassing hundreds of students over three decades. USC settled for US$1.1bn in all — US$215m in a federal class action and US$852m to 710 women in state court — the largest sexual abuse payout in the history of American higher education. Tyndall had been offered a severance package rather than dismissed.
The university paid out one point one billion. It paid him seven point seven million to go.
Around £1.5m in salary, bonuses and pension in 2016, including £591,000 of bonuses. After stepping down in July 2017 the company kept paying his £660,000 salary and £28,000 of benefits. Carillion had changed the wording of its pay policy in 2016, making clawback harder.
Debited DR
Carillion went into liquidation in January 2018 owing about £3bn, taking suppliers and public contracts with it. MPs found a 'rotten corporate culture'. Executives declined to repay bonuses, saying they had earned them.
The clawback rules were changed first. The company collapsed second.
RMB298m for 2017, from Evergrande's own annual report and the largest of the thirteen years it paid him. The year before, Forbes had put him top of its ranking of chief executives at Hong Kong-listed Chinese companies on RMB270m, against RMB9.79m for the head of Vanke — which is how he came to be known as the wage king. Across 2008 to 2020 Evergrande paid him RMB1.64bn, RMB1.43bn of it salary. The company later argued such totals overstate what was received, because Hong Kong rules require share options to be expensed at their grant-date value even when they can never be exercised.
Debited DR
In November 2024 Evergrande told managers who had served between 2017 and 2021 to hand back 15% of their salaries and bonuses, into an account opened by police. Staff at its wealth arm were told to return commissions on investment products they had been given targets to sell; many had bought the products with their own money to hit those targets and never recovered it, and about RMB41bn was owed to investors at the end of 2021, more than RMB30bn of it still unpaid two years later. Xia was fined RMB15m and banned from China's securities market for life for organising the preparation of false accounts, having been forced out in July 2022 over a RMB13.4bn pledge of Evergrande Property Services' deposits. More than 160,000 people left the group in the two years after it blew up.
The wage king kept his. The staff were told to send fifteen per cent of theirs to a police account.
US$20m in cash on signing, with a target annual bonus of 140% of base salary on top. Shareholders later added US$4m a year in long-term equity.
Debited DR
He cancelled employee bonuses for 2017 while senior management kept theirs, and Israeli staff sued over it. Outgoing chief executive Erez Vigodman took a US$2m bonus after stepping down, and the interim chief executive was paid US$9.2m for eight months.
The staff bonuses were cancelled. The management bonuses were not.
A change-of-control package of about US$23m — US$3m in cash, US$20m in equity and roughly US$25,000 of continuing medical cover — set out in the proxy and triggered when Verizon's purchase closed in June 2017.
Debited DR
She bought Tumblr for Yahoo in May 2013 for about US$1.1bn, announcing it on Tumblr itself: “We promise not to screw it up.” Yahoo wrote off US$230m of that in February 2016 and a further US$482m by the summer — more than half the price in under three years — and Verizon sold it on in 2019 for a reported US$3m. Yahoo also disclosed a breach of 500 million accounts in September 2016 and a billion more that December, revising the total in October 2017 to all three billion it had ever held; Verizon cut US$350m from what it paid. Her US$2m cash bonus for 2016 was cancelled and she gave up her 2017 equity award, worth at least US$12m. The change-of-control package was conditional on none of it.
She promised not to screw it up. It sold for three million dollars.
About US$1m in severance, on being forced out in March 2017 under pressure from the United States Olympic Committee.
Debited DR
He had waited five weeks before passing to the FBI what the gymnast Maggie Nichols reported in 2015 about Larry Nassar, the team doctor later sentenced for abusing hundreds of girls. In October 2018 Penny was arrested at a cabin in Tennessee and charged with tampering with evidence, accused of having documents removed from the Karolyi ranch where much of the abuse happened; he pleaded not guilty. USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic committee later settled with survivors for US$380m.
Five weeks before he told the FBI. A million dollars on the way out.
He left with about US$130m in stock, options and pension after forfeiting US$41m. The board eventually clawed back US$69m in total. His 2015 pay alone was US$19.3m.
Debited DR
Wells Fargo staff opened as many as two million unauthorised accounts to hit sales targets. The bank fired 5,300 employees over the tactics. Stumpf was later banned from banking for life and fined US$17.5m.
Five thousand three hundred people were sacked for hitting the targets he set.
£70m for 2015, of which £63m came from a single five-year scheme, the Leadership Equity Acquisition Plan. The best-paid chief executive in the FTSE 100, in a year when the index's median was a small fraction of it.
Debited DR
More than 33% of shareholders voted against the remuneration report at the 2016 annual meeting, and more than 34% failed to back it once abstentions were counted — the worst revolt at a WPP meeting since the 60% defeat of 2012.
Two shareholder revolts, four years apart, and the scheme paid out both times.
€7.3m for 2015, including a €1m bonus, in the year the emissions scandal broke. He also draws a pension of about €1.1m a year.
Debited DR
Volkswagen rigged diesel engines to cheat emissions tests. Winterkorn later agreed to pay the company €11.2m in damages for failing to get to the bottom of it promptly.
A €7.2m package for 2015. Shareholders voted it down; the board approved it anyway the same day. The French state, a shareholder, had pressed for the cut.
Debited DR
The override became a national argument about whether say-on-pay meant anything in France, and helped force the law that made such votes binding. A separate golden parachute worth about €30m was scrapped in 2019 after his arrest in Japan, during the gilets jaunes protests.
The shareholders voted no. The board voted yes. The board won.
US$28.6m on resigning: US$4.88m of cash severance, US$3.5m of restricted shares vested early, and US$19.5m of performance awards. The separation agreement let the company rescind the payments if he failed to cooperate with the investigations, or was convicted of a felony.
Debited DR
He resigned in September 2015 while federal prosecutors were examining whether United had tried to sway the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The airline had reinstated a Newark to Columbia route it had already turned down as unprofitable, running twice a week near David Samson's holiday home; Port Authority staff called it the Chairman's flight and it lost about US$945,000. United signed a non-prosecution agreement and paid a US$2.25m penalty, and Samson pleaded guilty to bribery.
The flight lost nine hundred thousand dollars. The man who restarted it left with twenty-eight million.
US$556,772 in total compensation, from the charity's own Form 990: US$496,877 of base pay, a US$15,000 bonus, US$31,617 of deferred compensation and the rest in other reportable and non-taxable benefits.
Debited DR
The Red Cross raised nearly US$488m for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and said it would build new communities there. NPR and ProPublica reported in June 2015 that it had built six permanent homes. The charity disputed the account, saying it had helped build and run eight hospitals and clinics and moved more than 100,000 people out of tents with rent assistance. A Senate investigation the following year found fundamental concerns about how the organisation reported what it spent.
Four hundred and eighty-eight million dollars raised. Six houses built.
More than forty current and former staff told CBS News that the charity was spending donations on itself: US$26m on staff conferences in 2014 alone, including about US$3m on four days in Colorado for some 500 employees, with bar tabs of US$2,500 and resort trips. Around 40% of what it raised went on overhead. It had taken in more than US$800m in four years for wounded veterans. He was dismissed with the chief operating officer in March 2016.
Twenty-six million dollars of veterans' donations, spent on staff conferences.
An exit package of US$90m, paid at between US$1.25m and US$2.5m a month over four years, in return for not joining a rival and not disparaging the company. Google announced the departure with a public tribute from a co-founder.
Debited DR
The New York Times reported in 2018 that Google had asked for the resignation after investigating an employee's misconduct claim and concluding it was credible. A spokesperson for Rubin said he left “on his own accord”, had never been told of any misconduct at Google, and that any relationship he had while there was consensual. Staff walked out worldwide over the company's handling of such cases, and Alphabet later paid US$310m to settle shareholder litigation and agreed to ban severance for anyone fired for misconduct.
Ninety million dollars, and a public tribute on the way out.
A package of about £3.6m — a £1.5m salary and a £1.5m retention payment — which the members who own the group learned about only when the details were leaked to the Observer. Six other directors were on £500,000 to £650,000 plus retention, and the finance director on £900,000 plus £900,000.
Debited DR
The Co-operative Group is owned by its members, and had just posted a loss of £2.5bn for 2013 — the worst in its history — most of it from the bank it had merged with Britannia Building Society. Sutherland resigned within days of the leak, saying the group was ungovernable. The bonuses were withheld the month after that.
The people who owned the company found out what it was paying him the same way everyone else did.
A US$159m lump sum, disclosed in a June 2013 filing as what he was entitled to had he left voluntarily on 31 March. Compensation consultants called it by far the largest pension held by a serving executive of a US public company — more than double the next, Rupert Murdoch's US$74m. He gave up US$45m of it the following year.
Debited DR
In January 2017 McKesson paid a US$150m civil penalty, the largest in DEA history, for failing to detect and report suspicious orders of controlled substances. The government dated the conduct from 2008 to 2013 — the years the pension was accruing. Shareholders voted down the pay report in 2013, and again in 2017.
The pension and the penalty are nine million dollars apart.
A departure package reported at about £12m: a year's salary of roughly US$1.6m in lieu of notice, and a pension pot worth many times it. He also took a post at BP's Russian joint venture.
Debited DR
The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April 2010, killing 11 workers and causing the largest marine oil spill in history. BP posted a US$17bn quarterly loss and withheld most staff bonuses for the year.
An annual pension of £703,000, drawn from the age of 50 on early retirement, on top of a £2.7m lump sum already taken and the bonuses he kept. After a public outcry he agreed in June 2009 to take £342,500 instead, cutting the pot from about £16.6m to about £9m. An internal review had found no legal grounds to reduce it.
Debited DR
A month after he left, RBS reported a 2008 loss of £24.1bn — the largest annual loss in British corporate history. The bank was rescued with public money.
He took early retirement at fifty. The taxpayer did not.
US$484m in salary, bonuses and stock between 2000 and 2008 — the figure the House Oversight Committee put to him in October 2008, a month after the collapse. He disputed it and gave his own total as about US$310m. A Harvard study of the same period found he cashed out roughly US$529m before the bankruptcy.
Debited DR
Lehman filed for bankruptcy on 15 September 2008 with US$639bn of assets against US$613bn of debts, the largest filing in United States history. About 25,000 people worked there. Barclays' purchase of the North American business saved roughly 10,000 of those jobs.
Total compensation of US$521.5m between 2000 and 2008, including nearly US$400m in the four years to 2006.
Debited DR
Countrywide was the largest subprime mortgage lender in the United States and was sold to Bank of America in 2008 as the market collapsed. The Justice Department dropped its mortgage fraud investigation in 2016.
US$161.5m on retiring with immediate effect on 30 October 2007: about US$129m in stock and options whose vesting was accelerated, plus roughly US$30m of pension and retirement accruals.
Debited DR
Days earlier Merrill had reported a US$2.24bn quarterly loss on a US$7.9bn writedown of mortgage-backed assets. Within fourteen months the firm had been sold to Bank of America.
Two per cent of the writedown, paid to the man who signed it off.
US$210m on resigning in January 2007, after six years in which Home Depot's share price fell 9% and Lowe's, its nearest rival, rose 188%.
Debited DR
Seven times the US$30m the company had set aside six months earlier to reward stores and staff for good customer service. Union pension funds took the payout to the annual meeting; the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee called it confirmation of a pattern of pay out of control.
Seven years of the customer-service budget, paid once, to one person.
About US$180m on retirement: US$82.3m of pension, US$77.9m of deferred compensation and more than US$20.7m in cash and stock. A further US$18.3m share award, contingent on later performance, would have taken it close to US$200m.
Debited DR
In 2009 Pfizer paid US$2.3bn to settle criminal and civil charges over off-label promotion — then the largest health care fraud settlement in United States history — including the marketing of Bextra, which the FDA had it pull from the market in 2005, during his time as chief executive.
Shareholders hired a plane. The banner read “Give it back, Hank!”
The incentive and equity compensation taken between 2003 and 2006 — cash bonuses, profits from exercising and selling stock, and unexercised options — which he later agreed to reimburse in full under the clawback provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Debited DR
The SEC found the company had concealed more than US$1bn of stock option compensation between 1994 and 2005 by choosing grant dates after the fact, picking days when the share price had been at its lowest, and signing documents falsely showing the options had been granted then. He resigned in October 2006 and settled in December 2007 for US$468m, the largest settlement in an options backdating case.
The dates on the options were chosen after the fact.
A US$98m lump-sum pension on retiring at the end of 2005, after 43 years at the company. The retirement was widely reported at the time as a US$398m package; that larger number sums salary, bonuses and share awards granted across several earlier years, so only the pension is counted here.
Debited DR
Between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil paid nearly US$16m to 43 organisations working to cast doubt on the science of climate change, using, the Union of Concerned Scientists found, the tactics and in places the same people as the tobacco industry.
Forty-three years in, ninety-eight million out, forty-three front groups funded.
A severance package of about US$21.4m on being forced out by the board in February 2005, after nearly six years. Counting stock and options already held, contemporary estimates of the total put it above US$42m.
Debited DR
The US$25bn purchase of Compaq in 2002, then the largest technology merger ever and the centrepiece of the tenure, did not deliver what was promised. 30,000 US workers were laid off. The board said it acted because costs had not been cut and revenue had not grown as it had hoped.
The merger cost thirty thousand jobs. Leaving it cost twenty-one million.
A departure package of €38.5m, combining severance, a non-competition clause and pension.
Debited DR
Staff went on strike when the terms became public, and the payout caused a national outcry that fed directly into France's rules on executive severance.
A US$139.5m lump sum of deferred compensation, disclosed in August 2003, on top of a US$1.4m salary and a US$1m annual bonus. The New York attorney general later put the full package at US$187.5m and said directors had been misled about it.
Debited DR
The exchange was a not-for-profit corporation, and New York law required pay there to be reasonable and commensurate with services performed. Grasso resigned the following month. The attorney general sued to recover the money; in 2008 the Court of Appeals dismissed every claim and he kept it.
A pension and benefits package of CHF148m, agreed on leaving the chief executive's job in 1996 and disclosed only in February 2002. ABB's own board then found the approval procedures had been unsatisfactory. He agreed to return CHF90m; with his successor's CHF85m package, CHF137m went back to the company.
Debited DR
It surfaced as ABB fought for survival. The share price fell roughly 90% across 2001 and 2002 — 62% in a single day in October — the group faced more than 100,000 asbestos claims with US$4.7bn of borrowing falling due, and by November 2002 it was close to bankruptcy.
A pension the size of the hole the company was in.
12,150,000 shares — 60% of the 1995 Key Employee Stock Ownership Plan, the largest of three shares fixed in the 1995 proxy. Valued here at 60% of the US$1,071m the company charged against its own earnings for the grant; contemporary reporting put his portion at about US$550m. He returned 2,700,000 shares in the 2000 settlement. The compensation committee that put the plan to shareholders included Richard Grasso, who appears on this register in his own right.
Debited DR
The whole grant was charged at US$1,071m in the half year to September 1998, turning a US$428m profit for the same period a year earlier into a US$187m loss. It vested because the share price held above a target; the company later restated US$2.2bn of revenue improperly booked in 2000 and 2001, and the chief operating officer went to prison for securities fraud. Shareholders sued, and Delaware's Court of Chancery took 4,500,000 shares back across the three men.
The grant was triggered by a share price the company was later accused of inventing.
6,075,000 shares — 30% of the 1995 Key Employee Stock Ownership Plan, a share fixed in the 1995 proxy before anyone knew what it would be worth. Valued here at 30% of the US$1,071m the company charged against its own earnings for the grant. He returned 1,350,000 shares in a 2000 settlement approved by Delaware's Court of Chancery.
Debited DR
The shares vested because the price held above a target. Computer Associates later restated US$2.2bn of revenue improperly booked in 2000 and 2001; prosecutors said more than US$2bn was manipulated under his direction to prop the stock up. By then chief executive, he pleaded guilty in April 2006 to eight felonies including securities fraud and obstruction of justice, and was sentenced that November to 12 years and a US$8m fine.
The price target was the trigger. The revenue behind it was invented.
2,025,000 shares — 10% of the plan, the smallest of the three shares, and set at 10% in the 1995 proxy. Valued here at 10% of the US$1,071m the company charged against earnings. He returned 450,000 shares in the 2000 settlement. A co-founder of the company, he was not accused of wrongdoing in the accounting case that later sent the chief executive to prison.
Debited DR
The grant alone cost US$1,071m, charged in the half year to September 1998 — enough to turn a US$428m profit for the same period a year earlier into a US$187m loss. Shareholders sued; in November 1999 Delaware's Court of Chancery ordered 9.5m shares returned, and a settlement the following June took back 4,500,000 across the three men.
The smallest share of the three, and still a hundred million dollars.
A profit of about US$565m from exercising stock options in December 1997 — at the time the largest single option exercise by any corporate executive, and the biggest payday on record. He had already broken the record in 1993, at US$203.1m.
Debited DR
The same company, a year earlier, had paid Michael Ovitz US$140m to leave after fourteen months — a payment shareholders spent nine years litigating. Both awards came out of the board Eisner chaired.
The largest payday in history, one year after the largest payoff.
US$140m to leave after fourteen months as president — roughly US$10m for each month in the job. The contract was written in 1995 and the board granted a non-fault termination, which is what triggered it.
Debited DR
Shareholders sued the directors over it and the case ran for nine years. In 2005 the Delaware Court of Chancery found the board's “lapses were many” but that no duty had been breached and no corporate assets wasted. The payment stood.
Ten million a month, and a court called it lawful.
A 1995 package valued at US$16m: US$5.2m in salary, bonus and stock, plus options with a market value of US$10.8m over 750,000 shares, exercisable from 1999. AT&T made almost no profit that year.
Debited DR
Disclosed in the proxy weeks after AT&T announced on 2 January 1996 that it would cut 40,000 jobs. The Communications Workers of America called it “mindless job destruction”; Newsweek put the chief executives behind the year's layoffs on its cover under the headline “Corporate Killers”.
Forty thousand redundancies in January. The pay packet in February.
About US$100m in share options and stock appreciation, realised when Scott Paper was sold to Kimberly-Clark for US$9bn — twenty months after he arrived.
Debited DR
11,000 people lost their jobs, about a third of the workforce, including half the managers and a fifth of hourly staff. Research spending was cut, factories closed, and the company's US$3m philanthropy budget was abolished outright.
Eleven thousand jobs, twenty months, one hundred million dollars.
A 75% rise, to £475,000, two years after privatisation. The chairman told the annual meeting the total package, with bonuses and share options, ran to about £1m — and defended it as the same method the company used to set pay for “engineers, computer operators, middle management and others”.
Debited DR
Awarded the same week staff were told to hold their own rises below 3%, as the company worked through a programme to cut 25,000 jobs and household gas bills were going up. Protesters brought a pig named Cedric and a bucket labelled “privatisation trough” to the 1995 annual meeting. Individual shareholders voted overwhelmingly against reappointing him; institutional proxy votes kept him in the job.
They brought a pig to the annual meeting and named it after him.
Reported at US$53m on leaving in February 1989, after the US$25bn leveraged buyout he set in motion and then lost. Estimates of the payout run from more than US$50m upward; US$53m is the figure carried in Barbarians at the Gate, written by the two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered the deal.
Debited DR
Six months later R.J. Reynolds Tobacco laid off 1,640 people in North Carolina — more than a tenth of its workforce — restructuring, in UPI's words, “in the wake of the leveraged buyout”. The cut ran to 825 salaried staff, 700 hourly workers and 115 temporary and part-time employees, some of them let go the same day.