This is nuts!

Tory donor faces second rebellion over son’s £500k

A TORY donor and scion of the KP Nuts dynasty is embroiled in an extraordinary row over the fat-cat pay handed to two of his sons.

Sir Michael Heller is this week under fire for the second time in a fortnight for the rewards that are being lavished on his own offspring at companies he chairs.

The latest showdown is at London & Associated Properties, where the 82-year-old is chairman and his son John, 52, is chief executive. Shareholders plan to stage a rebellion over John’s near £500,000 pay packet.

The latest revolt comes hot on the heels of an angry protest by invest ors over a £ 900,000 package handed to his younger son Andrew, 50, who is managing director of Bisichi Mining, where Heller senior is also the chairman. Nearly a third of the shareholders voted against Andrew’s pay.

Although the sums handed to the Heller siblings are not immense by FTSE 100 standards, investors are annoyed as they believe their rewards are too large in proportion to the value of the companies they lead. John has been paid £6.7 million over the past decade at LAP, the listed shopping centre owner that sold Brixton Market earlier this year for £37 million.

Last night, investor Andrew Perl off, who separately owns the department store group Beales, urged fellow LAP shareholders to vote against the firm’s pay plan at its annual meeting on Tuesday.

Sir Michael and the Heller family controls LAP which in turn has a large stake in Bisichi.

Perloff, a Ukip donor who has a 3 per cent stake in LAP, said Heller’s pay was ‘completely inappropriate’ for a company with a market value of less than £25 million. He wants the Heller family to put an end to the dispute by buying out the minority shareholders in LAP ‘at a fair price’.

He complained that LAP’s share price is very low compared with the value of the properties it owns. LAP has dismissed the resolution as ‘pure opportunism’. Perloff is ‘not confident’ of victory but added: ‘This is just the beginning.’

Paul Mumford, whose Cavendish Asset Management is a major shareholder of both Bisichi and LAP, said John Heller was ‘very overpaid’ at LAP. Mumford voted against the Bisichi pay report.

In the late 1940s, Sir Michael’s father Simon bought a jams firm before launching KP Nuts in 1953. He sold the company 15 years later to McVitie’s owner United Biscuits for £3.5 million, with Sir Michael as managing director.