Don’t mention the £75m bonus!
Building fat cat flounces out of TV interview
THE building firm boss hit by an avalanche of criticism over his £75million bonus has flounced out of a television interview after being asked about the vast payout.
Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of Persimmon, refused to answer an interviewer when asked if he regretted taking the astonishing bonus – one of the biggest in British corporate history.
He was at one stage in line to receive £131million, but this later fell to £75million – still enough to employ nearly 3,400 NHS graduate nurses for a year.
The payout triggered a fierce backlash with critics arguing that the building company’s success was partly because of the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, which has lent billions to families buying their first home. Mr Fairburn was at one stage nicknamed ‘Mr £131million’. Persimmon posted profits of £516million for the first half of 2018. The video of Mr Fairburn’s interview with BBC Look North starts with reporter Spencer Stokes asking him whether he had any regrets about the furore caused by his bonus.
Then a woman off-camera – thought to be a PR – can be heard asking ‘Can we not?’, before adding: ‘We’re talking about the factory.’
Mr Fairburn agrees and then says: ‘I’d rather not talk about that. It’s been well-covered, actually.’ When pressed again on whether he had learned any lessons from the row, Mr Fairburn does not reply and instead lowers his head and walks off camera.
The married father of three can then be heard saying: ‘I think that’s really unfortunate actually that you’ve done that.’
Last night Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, said: ‘It shows once again what a stunning lack of judgment it was by Persimmon to make the award and for Mr Fairburn to accept it.
‘A bonus of that size would be ludicrously disproportionate in any circumstance, but even more so when the increase in the company’s profits was so clearly the result of outside circumstances nothing to do with the executives.
‘If he was even a fraction as good a business leader as his bonus implied, he’d have foreseen this straight away and turned down the award.’
Labour MP Clive Betts, chairman of the Commons housing, communities and local government committee, said: ‘It is pretty outrageous. I understand why Mr Fairburn does not want to defend himself, because his position is indefensible. He has received his bonus on the back of a rise in profits driven almost entirely by taxpayer money, through Help to Buy, which has allowed developers to simply put up prices.’
Mr Fairburn received the bonus under a scheme which rewarded Persimmon executives for paying dividends to shareholders. This triggered share awards to him worth around £75million, awarded in tranches last year and this year. Other bosses at Persimmon received hundreds of millions of pounds between them.
It was controversial because more than half the homes sold by Persimmon used the Help to Buy scheme. Mr Fairburn has said he will give give a sizeable chunk of his bonus to charity.
‘A stunning lack of judgment’