SORRELL: HE WAS PAID £50,000 FOR STAYING IN HIS OWN HOME

SIR Martin Sorrell is the ad man whose £43m pay package makes him the best paid boss in the FTSE 100. Despite his vast wealth, the annual report of the WPP advertising empire he founded reveals he was also paid a £50,000 allowance... to stay in his own home.

The small print of the pay report discloses that Sorrell, pictured, receives an ‘accommodation allowance’ if he stays in one of his houses when working abroad.

The tycoon, who has a £325m fortune and is Britain’s 54th richest man according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, owns an apartment in New York. The firm says he receives the all owance as it is c heaper t han the room he had previously used in the hotel of his choice.

In the past Sorrell has been rebuked by investors over the scale of his pay and benefits. The latest £43m package is a 44pc increase on the previous year and will add petrol to the flames. It is not as much, however, as the £53m he managed to walk away with in 2004. The document also shows he received £274,000 to take his wife around the world with him as well as £43,000 for ‘other expenses’ – understood to include membership of clubs, security and office facilities at his homes.

WPP chairman Philip Lader, a former US ambassador to London, denied that WPP was run as a ‘personal fiefdom’ saying: ‘This chief executive... acts as an owner-entrepreneur, within the governance requirements of public ownership.’

Investors have in the past waged war with Lader over the scale of executive pay, with 60pc refusing to back the pay awards in 2012.

Sorrell’s £43m pay leaves that of other CEOs in the shade. He took home more than twice the amount of the number two earner, Ben van Beurden at Royal Dutch Shell, and more than eight times the average for a chief executive.

He made more than 1,600 times the average UK full-time earnings of about £26,500 a year.