Rehab chief paid annual salary of €234,000

ANGELA KERINS, the chief executive of the disability organisation Rehab, is on an annual salary of €234,000 and will not receive a bonus payment this year, according to the chairman of the organisation Brian Kerr.

Mr Kerr said it had been decided to disclose Mrs Kerins’s salary, despite it not being the organisation’s policy to do so.

“Given the seriously inaccurate, wild and unfair speculation in the media about our CEO’s salary package, at the request of Mrs Kerins we have decided to publish the figure,” he said in a statement.

Mrs Kerins has up to now refused to respond to reports that her salary, bonus and expenses package was worth more than €400,000 in 2009. As well as being chief executive of Rehab, she was appointed to several State boards by Fianna Fáil governments.

Rehab did not disclose other details of Mrs Kerins’s package, only her salary, which was unchanged on 2010. Mr Kerr said Mrs Kerins took a 10 per cent voluntary pay cut in 2010, indicating a salary of €260,000 in 2009, had the use of a company car, and got “normal” contributory pension payments. “As with everyone else in Rehab, work-related expenses are paid on a vouched basis,” he said. He made no comment about bonuses in 2009.

He said senior salaries in Rehab were set by the board, based on professional remuneration advice and were independently benchmarked. In addition to its charitable activities, Rehab has significant multimillion commercial operations comparable in scale with many of the commercial semi-States. Mrs Kerin’s salary was below the Department of Finance guidelines on chief executive pay for semi-State and State companies, he said.

The salaries of the Rehab chief and senior members of management come from its commercial activity and are not paid from HSE, Fás or Department of Education funding or fundraising income, Mr Kerr said. “All fundraising income, net of direct local costs, goes straight to specific projects or activities for people with disabilities or other disadvantaged groups.” He said Rehab, through its subsidiaries, received a contract fee from State agencies for the delivery of specified services, the majority of which were awarded from competitive tendering processes. These were subject to audit and achievement of outcomes, as with any other firm providing services to the State.

In the last three years alone, Rehab, through Mrs Kerins’s leadership, had created more than 500 sustainable jobs for people with and without disabilities, developed hundreds of services for thousands of people and had increased turnover by 17 per cent, Mr Kerr said.

The Government has said it is going to review the size of salaries paid to senior executives in State-funded organisations that provide services to people with disabilities.