Games fat cats still on £1.5m
PAY JUMPS 5 YEARS ON
OLYMPICS bosses are still paying themselves almost £1.5million a year – five years after the end of the London 2012 Games.
Nine “senior employees” overseeing the future of London 2012 assets are earning between £99,000 and £263,000 a year, including pension and compensation benefits.
The news was revealed in accounts released by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC).
And it comes despite the cost of modifying the Olympic Stadium for use by West Ham United rocketing to £323million and leading to the resignation of former chairman David Edmonds last year.
Top-ranking officials enjoyed huge pay deals, according to figures for last year, with every remaining senior employee getting an increase on their 2015 salary.
Chief executive officer David Goldstone, inset, was paid £263,000 including £39,000 in bonuses, £26,000 in pension contributions and £1,000 in expenses. That’s an increase of 51% on his 2015 salary of £129,000 when he held the same position.
The executive director of finance and corporate services saw her salary soar from £57,000 in 2015 to £170,000 for the same job last year – a 66% increase.
Julian Cheyne, of pressure group Games Monitor, said last night: “The LLDC is an entirely unnecessary layer of bureaucracy in East London which appropriates anything and everything being built in the wider Stratford area as an Olympic Legacy even though these developments would have been happening anyway.”
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “These figures are astonishing.
“How on earth can the Corporation justify these pay rises at taxpayers’ expense when ordinary families as well as public sector workers have faced pay freezes or worse over the last few years? “How is a 66% pay rise good value for taxpayers’ money?”
Other big earners included Paul Bricknell, the executive director of regeneration and community partnerships. He saw his salary rise 7% from £158,000 to £170,000. Nine senior employees were paid total wages of £1,487,000 last year compared to £1,529,000 in 2015 for 12 senior staff members.
After the resignation of former LLDC boss David Edmonds in November it was feared the taxpayer would be saddled with the cost of converting the London Stadium for use by a football club for years.
The conversion was predicted to cost £272m, but has risen to £323m.
West Ham contributed just £15m towards the project, with the rest coming from the taxpayer.