Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary made a €4.16 million pretax profit this week exercising options to buy shares in the carrier and immediately selling the stock on the market.
The carrier said on Friday that Mr O’Leary bought 1 million shares at €8.345 a piece the previous day under a company stock options scheme of which he is a beneficiary. He then sold the stock at €12.50 each, taking advantage of how the shares was trading at premium to the price at which he was entitled to purchase them.
Mr O’Leary, who has led Ryanair since 1994, made a €23.3 million pretax profit last November by exercising options over 2.5 million shares and disposing of stock.
He continues to own almost 3.9 per cent of Ryanair, with his 44.1 million shares worth almost €564 million, based on their closing price in Dublin of €12.79 on Friday.
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Meanwhile, the long-standing chief executive is also signed up to the potentially most lucrative incentive plan in the Irish market.
While Mr O’Leary signed a five-year contract in early 2019 that cut his annual base pay and maximum bonus each in half to €500,000, it also included options to buy 10 million Ryanair shares at €11.12 each if its net profit topped €2 billion in any of the years, or if its share price exceeded €21 for a period of 28 days between April of this year and March 2024.
Ryanair last reported an annual profit of €1 billion in its financial year to March 2020, just as Covid was sweeping the globe. The company’s shares, which have fallen by almost 20 per cent in value over the past 12 months, are changing hands at a fraction of the €21 target.
However, Mr O’Leary told analysts in May that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Ryanair would hit one of the two targets tied to the options.
“If I don’t get there, well then shareholders have had the benefit of my leadership at a deeply discounted rate for the last three years,” he said at the time.
