Pay still a hot topic despite Tesco chief's gesture

LONDON BRIEFING:THREE cheers for Phil Clarke, chief executive of Tesco, who has turned down a bonus of £372,000 because of the retailer's poor performance.

And let’s have an even bigger round of applause for the 5,000 middle managers at the supermarket chain, who don’t earn anything like Clarke’s £1.1 million in salary and benefits, and who’ve seen their bonuses slashed to less than a fifth of what they would have earned in a good year. For a store manager, that means bonuses have tumbled from £10,000 to about £2,000.

The Tesco managers had no say in the size of their windfalls, but their chief executive deserves praise for voluntarily forgoing his annual payout. However, the same “we’re all in this together” spirit doesn’t seem to extend to the rest of the top team at Tesco, which has long had one of the highest paid boards in Britain.

Clarke’s fellow directors have had their bonuses cut – not surprising in a year which saw the supermarket group issue its first profits warning in two decades – but are still being awarded 13.5 per cent of the maximum performance-related payout. As they’ve not said otherwise, we can only assume they have each decided against following the boss’s lead and intend to keep their bonuses.

The fact that any top-level payouts were awarded at Tesco at all is perhaps something of a surprise: in January, the group shocked the City by issuing an unprecedented profits warning, a move which saw £5 billion slashed from its stock market value as its shares tumbled. The shares have remained in the doldrums amid worries over the group’s strategy and falling share of its core UK market.

Clarke, a Tesco veteran, has been in the hot seat at Britain’s biggest retailer for a year now. It’s hard to say how much his bonus gesture owes to the current wave of shareholder activism sweeping through the City, but he will have been mindful that almost half the group’s investors failed to back Tesco’s remuneration policy at the annual meeting last year. That was one of the biggest protests ever suffered by a FTSE 100 company and came well before the phrase “shareholder spring” had been conjured up.

Tesco toughened up and simplified its pay policies in the wake of that embarrassing protest but, despite Clark’s gesture, is still likely to face shareholder anger at its meeting next month. One of the targets will once again be Tim Mason, the Tesco deputy chief executive who heads up its struggling Fresh Easy operation in the United States. His pay package last year, although half the previous year’s total, still topped £2 million, meaning he earned more than his chief executive.

Fresh Easy remains in the red and has been the focus of shareholder concern about Tesco’s strategy.

Despite its recent stumble, Tesco is a world-class retailer and we should not forget that it produced profits of £3.8 billion – up over 5 per cent – in a rare bad year.

At home, its profits fell 1 per cent to £2.5 billion, still way more than any other UK retailer.

The Tesco annual report published yesterday contains a wealth of information on boardroom pay, including charts revealing how much each executive director has earned over the past five years, taking in gains on share options, cash and deferred share bonuses, benefits and basic salary.

While it’s reasonable for a company of Tesco’s size and calibre to pay its executives significant sums, the boardroom remuneration haul taken by the top team over the past five years is a mind-blowing £85 million or so – and that doesn’t include the non-executive directors.

At Marks Spencer, meanwhile, bonuses are under threat in the boardroom and on the shop floor after the group reported its first fall in profits in three years and pegged its dividend at 17p a share.

Although slightly ahead of analysts’ expectations, underlying profits were down 1 per cent at £694 million and chief executive Marc Bolland has been forced to cut the group’s sales growth targets. Last autumn he set a target to grow turnover by between £1.5 billion and £2.5 billion over three years but now says it will be between £1.1 billion and £1.7 billion.

MS will not reveal bonus levels until its annual report is published in a few weeks’ time but its 78,000 employees are certain to see a significant reduction in their payments. The chief executive himself remains on course to receive a £6 million pay package, agreed when he joined the group a year ago. Shareholders will certainly have something to say about that when their turn comes.

FIONA WALSHwrites for the Guardian newspaper in London