- Andi Case received £10.4m bonus
- It makes him one of the highest paid bosses of any publicly traded company.
- Clarksons is a company little known outside the world of naval brokerage
The boss of shipping services group Clarksons is facing his eighth consecutive shareholder rebellion after receiving a blockbuster £12m pay package last year.
Andi Case, who has run the company since 2008, received a £10.4m bonus. This makes him one of the highest paid bosses of any company listed on the London Stock Exchange.
But Clarksons is a company little known outside the world of shipbroking. It is listed on the second-tier FTSE 250 index because, at just over £1.2bn, it is too small to make the elite Footsie index.
Despite this, Case is paid more than some of the higher-paid bosses of much better-known names.
His rewards surpassed those of HSBC’s Noel Quinn, who earned £10.6m, Tesco’s Ken Murphy, who will raise £10m, Wael Sawan’s £8m at Shell and Murray Auchincloss’s £8m at BP.
Troubled waters: Clarksons is a company little known outside the world of naval brokerage
His £12m salary was almost triple the amount given to Vincent Clerc, the boss of the world’s largest shipping company, Maersk, who earned £4.6m. Maersk is valued at £19.3 billion.
Case was paid less than several top FTSE 100 bosses, including AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot, who earned £17m last year.
Four in ten shareholders voted against Case’s remuneration at the 2023 annual meeting, putting Clarksons on the official “list of shame” of greedy bosses. It is a register run by the trade body, the Investment Association, which lists companies where more than 20 per cent of shareholders voted against executive pay.
AstraZeneca, Pearson, Unilever and Smith & Nephew have been embarrassed by investor revolts in recent years.
But leading voices, including London Stock Exchange boss Julia Hoggett, argue that big salaries are crucial to keeping talented bosses in the UK.
Clarksons says it needs to shell out big sums to stop its best customers leaving for competitors.
On the money: Clarksons boss Andi Case
Case and chief financial officer Jeff Woyda receive unlimited bonuses tied to group profits. Case, married with two children, has received £50m in the last decade.
He receives a salary of £550,000 and £17,000 in benefits, including a private car and membership in an unspecified number of private clubs. Critics said handing over such sums despite repeated revolts showed the company had a problem with its “moral compass.” Case, 57, joined Clarksons in 2006 and became its chief executive in 2008.
Two shareholder advisory groups, Pirc and Glass Lewis, recommended investors reject the pay report at their annual meeting this week.
Glass Lewis said that although Case and Woyda have waived some of their bonus in previous years, a company’s pay policy “should not depend on the goodwill of its executives to mitigate overpayments.”
Andrew Speke, of the High Pay Center think tank, said: “Clarkson’s clear disregard for the views of its shareholders shows a company severely lacking its moral compass.”
Tim Miller, a board director who heads the company’s compensation committee, defended Case’s rewards.
He said the company is a “UK success story” and that shareholders had benefited from “an increase in value during Andi’s tenure of more than 1,800 per cent”, which brought the company’s market value company “from £62 million to more than £1.2 billion today”.
