Business

Glanbia hands top executives shares worth close to €6m

Awards made as part of company’s 2018 incentive plan which grants shares based on executives meeting certain performance targets

Glanbia awarded the shares to a host of its top leaders

Barry J Whyte
Thu May 9 2024 - 06:00

Glanbia has issued around €6 million worth of bonus shares to some of its most senior executives, including €1.5 million worth to its new chief executive, Hugh McGuire.

The awards were made as part of Glanbia’s 2018 long-term incentive plan, which grants shares based on the executives meeting certain performance targets over the course of a given period.

McGuire was awarded 84,759 shares under the scheme, which, at the current Glanbia share price, would be worth around €1.5 million.

The stock market filing announcing the award noted that the number of awards granted was determined by reference to Glanbia’s share price in early May, which traded at around €17 at the time. The company’s shares have since risen in value to a recent high of around €18.19.

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According to the filing, chief financial officer Mark Garvey was granted 57,965 shares, while Brian Phelan, head of Glanbia Nutritionals, got 55,680 shares, which in both cases would be worth more than €1 million at the current share price.

Stephen Yucknut, the chief executive of Glanbia’s performance nutrition division, was granted 48,083 shares, worth approximately €875,000 at current prices.

Ian Doyle, the company’s chief corporate development officer, Wendy Smith, chief digital and transformation officer, and Susan Sweem, chief human resources officer, were all individually granted around 34,000 shares. That volume of shares would be worth slightly more than €620,000 at the current price.

Glanbia’s director pay programme was recently criticised by a number of investor advisory firms, as The Irish Times has reported.

Last month, the company’s remuneration policy was criticised by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, the world’s two most influential firms that advise investors on corporate governance issues.

The two firms criticised the company’s plan to give Garvey a stock-based bonus worth €750,000 as an incentive to remain with the company for at least two years. That incentive scheme is separate to the 2018 incentive plan under which the most recent shares were awarded, and related to directors’ pay policy for the period from 2024 to 2026.

It proved unpopular with shareholders, more than 27 per cent of whom voted against the proposal at the company’s annual general meeting on May 1.

While the vote is non-binding, such a figure is regarded as an embarrassing and public rejection of the proposal.

In a circular announcing the results, the company wrote that it “acknowledges the less than 80 per cent vote in favour of [the resolution] and in accordance with the UK Corporate Governance Code, the Company will engage with shareholders in order to understand the reasons behind the proxies received against this resolution and publish an update on the views received from shareholders and actions taken no later than 1 November 2024”.

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