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Sorrell keeps WPP $27M amid outcry

Ousted WPP founder Martin Sorrell got to keep his secrets — and his $27 million retirement package — after investor resentment at the ad giant’s annual meeting on Wednesday produced lots of heat, but nothing of legal consequence.

About 27 percent of shareholders voted against WPP’s remuneration report — a minority vote that permits Sir Martin to maintain his “good leaver” status from the company he founded 33 years ago.

The annual meeting also confirmed Sorrell can continue to hide behind a nondisclosure agreement, despite recent reports of a board investigation into whether he used corporate funds to pay a prostitute.

Sorrell has “strenuously denied” the accusations, and Roberto Quarta, who became WPP’s executive chairman after Sorrell unexpectedly resigned in April, admitted the company was in no position to elaborate.

“I know that questions remain,” Quarta said at the packed meeting in London, where WPP is based. “But there is simply nothing further we can legally disclose.”

Sorrell, 73, did not attend the meeting.

But Quarta said the former CEO’s contract dictated his exit be treated as a retire- ment — “unless a definition of gross misconduct could be satisfied, which it could not, and on which the board had clear legal advice.”

“I appreciate that some will find this unsatisfactory,” Quarta said.

Sorrell obtained what amounts to a clean bill of health despite harsh criticism from proxy advisers PIRC and Glass Lewis going into the meeting.

Their criticism also took issue with WPP’s failing to hold Sorrell to a noncompete clause — a governance oversight, they said, that has already allowed advertising’s most powerful executive to launch a rival agency.

Sorrell’s quick return to the industry moved one meeting attendee to ask why that in itself doesn’t constitute “gross misconduct.”

WPP shares fell 1.3 percent on Wednesday, to $82.42.