AstraZeneca chief earns £120m in 10 years

ASTRAZENECA boss Pascal Soriot scooped £15.3m in pay last year, taking his total earnings to almost £120m in a little over a decade at the pharmaceuticals giant.

The chief executive’s 2022 package marks the fourth straight year he has earned over £15m, but it was down slightly from the £15.7m he was given in 2021.

His package included a £1.4m salary, £13.6m in bonuses, benefits worth £136,000 and £150,000 in pension contributions. The total was 230 times the amount received by a typical AstraZeneca worker.

Luke Hildyard, director at the High Pay Centre, said: ‘These are really discomforting figures. A pay award of £15m, taking Soriot’s total pay over the past ten years to over £100m, is a highly unusual amount for someone who is just a manager of a long-established organisation, not an entrepreneur who built it from scratch.’

Soriot ( pictured) is one of the UK’s best known chief executives, having been at the helm of the firm since October 2012. In that time, pay has been a constant gripe for the Frenchman, who has complained bosses at rivals overseas earned more.

In 2018, after receiving a £13m pay award, Soriot caused a stir when he said: ‘The truth is I’m the lowest-paid chief executive in the whole industry.

‘It is annoying to some extent. But at the end of the day it is what it is.’

The 63-year-old’s latest payout comes just two weeks after he shone a light on Britain’s uncompetitive tax regime.

At the company’s annual results on February 9, Soriot blamed the high cost of doing business in Britain for prompting AstraZeneca to switch plans for a £330m investment in a new manufacturing facility to Ireland.

Soriot said the group wanted to build a new ‘state- of-the-art’ plant close to its existing sites in the North West, but instead chose Ireland because the UK tax regime was ‘discouraging’. Corporation tax in the UK is set to rise to 25pc from 19pc in April. Despite never being far from controversy, Soriot is credited with leading a turnaround that has transformed AstraZeneca’s image from laggard to pioneer, with a formidable portfolio of blockbuster drugs.

The company became a household name during Covid when it joined forces with Oxford University to produce a jab that was sold for no profit – although Soriot irked investors by spending much of the pandemic at his family home in Australia.

Before that, he saw off a £69bn raid in 2014 by US rival Pfizer, which wanted to buy AstraZeneca and use the UK as its headquarters for tax purposes.

Today, AstraZeneca is valued at almost £178bn after a near-300pc rise in its share price since Soriot took over.