You don’t deserve your £29m bonus, used car boss told
ONE of Britain best-paid female bosses has been slammed by critics over a £29 million bonus.
Avril Palmer-Baunack runs British Car Auctions, which owns We Buy Any Car, the car-buying website known for its catchy jingles.
The vast sum, 59 times her normal salary, is the result of an incentive plan drawn up four years ago to grow the firm. But it has now been criticised as ‘exceptionally high’ by City experts.
It is thought to be one of the largest-ever annual pay packets handed to a female company boss.
Palmer-Baunack, who has worked at the company since 2014, now faces an embarrassing revolt from shareholders this week at a crunch meeting. It is unusual for a female executive to be in the firing line over fat-cat pay. Male bosses are usually the ones pocketing enormous bonuses.
In leaked emails, one former male colleague recently remarked that he might have been better off if he had ‘a pair of t*** like Avril’.
Palmer- Baunack, who has a grown-up son and daughter and is married to a German executive at Volkswagen, previously defended her £ 7.1 million pay packet for 2015 by saying: ‘Anyone who says they don’t want money is talking b*******. We all want to earn money for our family.’
The Edinburgh-born executive, 54, has been vocal about women in the workplace in the past. She once said she was ‘very cynical’ about the existence of ‘glass ceilings’ – the term used to describe the limits on the career opportunities for women in big corpora- tions. ‘If you get up and do a good day’s work, you are respected for it,’ she said in an interview two years ago.
The former Saturday girl at Marks & Spencer had her first brush with full-time work at a car rental desk in Kennington, South London, where she found an affinity for selling and ‘how it was all about up-selling everything’.
Palmer-Baunack, who is executive chairman at BCA, is believed to be the highest paid female company boss of a London Stock Exchange-listed firm ever.
Last year, Theresa May announced plans to censure stock market- listed firms who drew exceptional levels of complaints from shareholders over bosses’ pay.
On top of the £29 million bonus, which is linked to an increase in the share price, she also got an eight per cent increase to her basic salary to £525,000. The company defended it by saying it needed to pay a ‘competitive’ rate. But in a report to investors, influential advisory firm Glass Lewis called the £29 million
‘We all want to earn money for our family’
payout to Palmer-Baunack ‘exceptionally disproportionate’.
It said the increase in the value of BCA may have been boosted by broader swings in stock market prices ‘ rather than company or management performance’.
The vote on the pay report is only advisory so, if Palmer- Baunack feels able to shrug off criticism, she will be allowed to keep the lot.
BCA declined to comment.