Now Persimmon finance chief to hand back cash
Killoran follows Fairburn with plans for charitable donation after outcry over huge incentives
THE finance director of Persimmon is planning to follow his boss’s l ead by donating some of his £82 million bonus to charity.
Sources said Mike Killoran is considering a similar move to Jeff Fairburn, the housebuilder’s chief executive.
Fairburn last week bowed to criticism following The Mail on Sunday’s revelations over his pay package and announced plans to give up some of his £100 millionplus bonus to good causes.
Dave Jenkinson, group managing director and the other major beneficiary of the bonus scheme, has not clarified what he plans to do with his payout, which is currently worth around £45 million.
Around 140 senior Persimmon managers stand to become millionaires from the £800 million bonus scheme, one of the most lucrative in UK corporate history.
Much of the scrutiny has been on Fairburn and his bonus, which was worth around £ 130 mill i on in December before the share price fell slightly. But Killoran and Jenkinson, the two other executive directors in the scheme, also stand to make a fortune.
Killoran, who joined Persimmon in 1996, will not have to pay for any of the shares once Persimmon has returned all the cash to shareholders. At the current share price of around £24, his bonus will be worth £82 million.
As Jenkinson only joined the board in 2013, a year after the scheme was introduced, he has to pay for some of the incentive shares. However, at the current price, he still stands to make around £45 million once all the cash promised to shareholders is paid out. The Mail on Sunday revealed in November that Fairburn was set to pocket the first £50 million of his bonus on New Year’s Eve.
The revelations sparked outrage and prompted the resignations of chairman Nicholas Wrigley and Jonathan Davie, a senior director who chaired the company’s remuneration committee, two weeks later. They admitted they had failed to put a cap on the scheme.
Wrigley is understood to have urged Fairburn to give some of it to charity. Fairburn, who has risen through the ranks of Persimmon over nearly 30 years, refused to comment on his plans and called them a pri- vate matter. But last week he broke his silence and said he had been mistaken. ‘In what might be considered to be an old-fashioned approach, I believed that this was a personal matter and that I would be able to do this privately. It’s now clear that this belief was misplaced and so I am making my plans public and recognise that I should have done so sooner,’ Fairburn said.
He is to set up a charitable trust, but declined to say how much he would be giving up or to which charities he would be donating, besides saying it would be a ‘substantial proportion of the total’.
Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed that the Church of Eng- land and the Methodist Church both voted against Persimmon’s executive pay last year and were considering similar protest votes at April’s annual meeting. Fairburn’s donation will be dwarfed by the gesture made by Redrow housebuilder Steve Morgan last year when he gave 42 million shares worth £250 million to his charitable foundation. In total, he has donated around £300 million.
Morgan hit out at Fairburn earlier this month and said Persimmon was ‘doing the whole of the industry a complete disservice’.
‘For somebody who has not taken a salary for 20 years it sticks in the craw, being called a greedy housebuilder because of that one company,’ Morgan said.
Killoran and Jenkinson declined to comment.