Profit & boss at Marks & Sparks
CEO gets £1.6m – 106 times his workers
MARKS & Spencer’s boss pocketed a near £600,000 bonus, despite profits plunging.
Chief executive Steve Rowe also got an £809,000 basic salary, £202,000 pension perk and £32,000 of extras, including a staff discount.
The total package – more than £1.6million – comes despite profits crashing by almost two-thirds to £176m in the year to April.
M&S used a different measure of profits, excluding one-off costs, to justify a total of £1.5m in annual bonuses for its top three bigwigs.
Finance chief Helen Weir got a £496,000 bonus, while Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne, executive director of customer, marketing and M&S.com, bagged a £459,000 annual reward. All three executives declined a 2% pay rise.
M&S said it was “satisfied the bonuses reflected hard work”. Under a shake-up, customer assistants got a 14.7% pay rise – to £8.50 an hour.
But it provoked a backlash as premium rates of pay for working Sundays, bank holidays and unsocial hours were scrapped or reduced.
Rowe’s salary is 52 times that of a fulltime worker on £15,470 a year. His £1.6m package is 106 times bigger.