Investor rebellion at Standard Chartered

STANDARD Chartered is facing a backlash from investors after changing its accounting rules to make boss Bill Winters’s pension payments look less extreme.

The bank is increasing its contributions to Winters’s retirement pot by £14,000 this year – but tweaking its pay calculations so it looks as though it represents a lower percentage of his salary than before.

It has infuriated shareholders who say it is a blatant attempt to get around guidelines intended to make pensions fairer. There is likely to be a major investor rebellion at the London-based lender’s annual meeting in spring.

Last year Winters got £460,000 for his pension, equal to 40pc of his near £1.2m basic salary paid in cash. The 57-year-old also got an extra £1.2m as a fixed pay allowance, given in shares.

The 40pc figure falls foul of Investment Association guidelines which recommend pensions should not be more than 24pc of a boss’s salary.

So for 2019, Standard Chartered is introducing a new policy which combines Winters’s fixed allowance and basic salary in a single £2.3m payment in its accounts.

This has allowed it to increase his pension contributions to £474,000 but claim that they now represent only 20pc.

One top shareholder told the Financial Times: ‘Shareholders are going to be crawling all over it – it’s not going to slip through.’