We recommend that for transparency and openness, information about the remuneration of management and their share options, should be drawn out and specified explicitly on the site, not left buried in the annual report.
Ideally, this would also be linked to information about the remuneration policy, and to information about the directors’ dealings in the company shares.
Signet do a great job of this: they provide dedicated pages in HTML (not PDFs), which cover their remuneration policy, what the directors are paid (by name) and what the shareholdings of each director are.
I don’t think that companies should necessarily be shy about publishing this information clearly, and in an easily accessible format; according to the Sunday Times this week, recent research, to be presented by Andrew Clark at this week’s Royal Economic Society conference at Warwick University, shows that high pay does not cause resentment because workers aspire to being paid such salaries themselves.
I can see, though, that it might be embarrassing for the individuals concerned …
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye