We see this every year – WPP Boss Sir Martin Sorrell gets a bumper pay award and a row among shareholders erupts.
This year is no different. The CEO of the world’s largest advertising agency holding group WPP is facing a shareholder revolt over his £43m pay award for 2014 – the second-largest annual sum he has earned.
A WPP spokesperson told LondonlovesBusiness.com “Over 90% of Sir Martin Sorrell’s remuneration in 2014 was performance based, the vast majority of which was from the five year LEAP scheme and £19m wholly attributable to share price appreciation and dividends. WPP achieved Total Shareholder Return of 171.5% in the five year period compared with the FTSE100’s 21.3% rise over the same period.”
Sir Martin Sorrell is the second most highly paid FTSE 100 chief executive after Royal Dutch Shell’s Ben van Beurden who received £20m in 2014. Sir Martin earned more than eight times the £5.04m average pay for a FTSE 100 boss, according to the High Pay Centre. (Read: The top 10 highest-paid CEOs in the FTSE 100)
According to the Sunday Times Rich List, Sir Martin is worth £257m.
In April this year, he donated £21m to his charitable trust. He gifted 1.42 million shares to the JMCMRJ Sorrell Charitable Foundation, a charity that provides “benefits for educational institutions, cancer research and to make grants for general charitable purposes”. This was the seventh consecutive year the APP chief donated shares to the charity.
Now in the past 11 years, Sir Martin has raked in about £184m.
Take a look at this graph to see how many millions he’s made since 2004:
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