£186m for Glencore boss

THE chief executive of mining and commodities trading giant Glencore will bag £186m in dividends this year.

Ivan Glasenberg will be handed the money after Glencore promised a payout worth 20 cents a share to investors.

The 62-year- old owns more than 1.2bn Glencore shares, or almost 9pc of the FTSE 100listed group. They are currently worth nearly £3.8bn.

In its full-year results, Switzerland-based Glencore also said it would buy back up to £1.5bn worth of its shares as higher pricing and production lifted full- year earnings by 8pc to £12bn in 2018.

But Glencore was hit by a £522m tax demand from the UK Government, which it intends to appeal against and ‘vigorously contest’.

The world’s biggest coal exporter also said it will bow to pressure from big investors and keep coal production at current levels of around 150m tons per year instead of expanding – to align its business with the 2016 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

Glencore said it would put more money into mining commodities used in electric vehicle batteries and other technologies vital in the shift to cleaner energy, such as copper, cobalt, nickel, zinc and vanadium.

Its stock has lost more than a quarter of its value in the last year and shares closed up 2.5pc, or 7.7p, to 310.45p.