'Wrong and ill-judged' | Is Boohoo's revised CEO pay structure a sign of things to come?

Executive compensation is traditionally structured not just around a salaried income, but also around incentivised reward for company performance, to align pay with shareholder value.

In theory, this means that if the company does well under a particular executive team, that team earns compensation in line with their successes. Or, if performance suffers under their leadership, they earn less. However, in practice, this hasn’t always been exactly how executive pay has panned out.

Pascal Soriot’s investor revolt

For example, last month pharma giant AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot caused yet another investor revolt (a similar event took place in 2019) as a result of his compensation package for 2021, totalling £15.45million – just £1.29million of this came from his base salary.