Executive pay under scrutiny

THE Australian Shareholders Association has called for companies to publish a pay ratio to compare their executive salaries with average weekly wages.

The move is part of the lobby group’s hit list of issues that it will take to the 2017 annual meeting and voting season.

ASA chief executive Judith Fox said yesterday it also wanted companies to disclose “actual” salaries and non-cash payments made to executive directors and senior executives. Not just the “agreed” salary as currently required by remuneration reports.

“Regardless of whether companies choose to disclose the (new) ratio, ASA will be calculating the ratio and including it in our voting intentions,” Ms Fox said.

“We want to know what a particular executive’s actual take-home pay is compared with the take-home pay of the average Australian. We think this is good information for shareholders to have.

“At the moment the rem report also paints a bit of a strange picture of what executives might get, not what they actually get.”

For the Scentre Group annual meeting in early April, the ASA has calculated Scentre Group chief executive Peter Allen earned 85 times the average Australian’s full-time wage last year. He was paid $7.05 million in 2016. However, this was less than half his previous year’s salary of $18.1 million.