It’ll help make up for a £116m divorce row! Ocado chief ’s £23m bonus
THE boss of online supermarket Ocado will bag a £23million bonus two years after his big money divorce was finalised.
The £116million fortune Tim Steiner made from Ocado was dented after a court battle with his wife of 14 years, Belinda.
The 49-year-old got together with his new partner, Polish lingerie model Patrycja Pyka, who is 20 years his junior, after his marriage ended.
Under the settlement with Belinda, 48, the father of four divided his £116million fortune with her. Their assets included a £15million mansion in Highgate, north London, and a ski chalet in French resort Courchevel.
But thanks to the success of the high-end grocer and its soaring share price Mr Steiner will remain a very rich man. In May he is in line for a long-term bonus worth up to four million shares.
Last year Ocado stock more than doubled from £4 a share to £8.76, making it one of Britain’s most successful shares. Precisely how much Mr Steiner will receive depends on how much the share price has increased in each of the past five years.
Company sources said he can expect to receive just over half the total possible rewards under the scheme, or 2.2million shares, equivalent to £19.14million at today’s share price.
He may receive more if there is another surge in the share price in the next few months – or less if they fall in value.
On top of this he will receive a portion of 430,000 shares, worth another £3.7million, under a separate incentive plan depending on the performance of the retail business in the past two years.
The lucrative awards are on top of a third scheme – a ‘golden handcuff’ of around eight million shares, worth £70million, that he was given in 2010 before Ocado floated on the stock market and matured in 2014.
By May, Mr Steiner could expect to own 25.6million shares in Ocado, taking his fortune to over £222million. The share deals far outweigh the £950,000 he received in salary, pensions and benefits in 2017.
Mr Steiner and his former wife married in 1999, the year before he set up Ocado.
In the High Court divorce battle in 2016 he cited ‘unreasonable behaviour’ as the cause of the marriage breakdown and friends reported deep-seated acrimony between the pair.
He put up £68million of Ocado shares as collateral for a loan to fund his divorce obligations in 2016. The loan has been paid back and Ocado said this week that he did not sell any of his shares to fund the settlement.
Last summer he was reportedly living with Miss Pyka, 29, in an £80,000-a-month rented mansion near the former family home.
His girlfriend, a dental hygiene graduate from humble beginnings who grew up in south-west Poland, is only 11 years older than Mr Steiner’s oldest son.
Ocado has become a stock market darling in the past year thanks to its pioneering technology such as stock-picking robots and state-of-the-art warehouses, earning it the nickname ‘the Microsoft of retail’.
Ocado declined to comment on the share scheme.