GREEDY ESTATE AGENT DUO ARE CASHING IN

BOSS: NIC BUDDEN, 53 COMPANY: FOXTONS 2020 PAY PACKET: £1.6m

PROTEST*: 42pc TOTAL PAY: £6.8m IN 6.5 YEARS

FOXTONS paid its chief executive a £1m bonus but is refusing to give back any of the £7m in pandemic support it has received from taxpayers. The estate agent handed boss Nic Budden a total of £1.6m last year.

Foxtons has benefited from the stamp-duty holiday, announced last July, which turbocharged the housing market.

The target for profit was reduced because of the pandemic.

Nearly 40pc of shareholders voted against the pay report at the annual meeting – counting abstentions, around 42pc of investors declined to give their support.

Budd took a 20pc cut in basic salary for the months of April and May 2020 when the housing market was closed. Yet his overall take still rose by £300,000 compared with 2019.

His lucrative package included nearly £1m in bonus payments to ‘reward hard work’.

A spokesman said: ‘We were very grateful for government support, which we used for as short a period as possible but entirely as it was intended – to keep people in jobs during a lengthy closure.’

BOSS: MARK RIDLEY, 59 COMPANY: SAVILLS 2020 PAY PACKET: £1.3m PROTEST*: 26pc TOTAL PAY: £3.7m IN 2 YEARS

SAVILLS handed a £350,000 bonus to its boss last year regardless of the firm’s failure to hit performance targets. This took Mark Ridley’s total pay to £1.3m in 2020.

The upmarket estate agent missed the profit hurdle for the bonus payout, but the pay committee gave it to Ridley anyway. The Investment Association issued a ‘red top’ notice, its strongest badge of disapproval. More than a quarter of Savills investors refused to back its pay report. Over one in five voted against and the rest abstained. Savills posted £84.7m in profit last year, way short of the £120m minimum bonus threshold.

The estate agent paid back furlough cash its staff had received. But, like Foxtons, it reaped large amounts of business due to the stamp-duty holiday which fuelled a mini-boom in the housing market.

Ridley was also given £500,000 for meeting other ‘key objectives’ during the pandemic. His package overall was reduced from nearly £2.4m in 2019. Savills said the board had ‘applied discretion’, and that the company had made significant progress in the year along with ‘impressive’ gains in market share.