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The danger in saying yes to Pascal Soriot’s pay rise at AstraZeneca | Nils Prately

Despite rebellion, approval of £18.7m package opens door to likelihood of US-style executive pay elsewhere

Is Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, “massively underpaid”, as the chief investment officer of Florida-based GQG Partners, one of the company’s big shareholders, argued this week? Well, of course he’s not. Soriot has been paid £120m over the past decade, which is a helluva sum even for someone who has been brilliantly successful in leading what is now – but wasn’t when he arrived – the UK’s second-largest listed company.

The history-turning moment in 2014, when AZ and Soriot managed to see off a bid from Pfizer’s grim number-crunchers, has probably been worth many multiples of £120m to the UK economy. But such a sum for a single employee in an organisation of 90,000 still looks absurd: Soriot doesn’t do all the work himself.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/V2FnCkM
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