Royal & SunAlliance (R&SA) chief executive Andy Haste has earned £1.4m in the nine months since he was brought in to aid the troubled general insurer, revealed a report.
Haste, who was appointed in April 2003, was paid a basic salary of £450,000 in his first nine months, in addition to an annual bonus of £570,000.
His total pay packet includes £224,000 for lost bonuses when he left his role of chief executive of AXA Sun Life, a retirement allowance of £108,000 and a car and medical benefits worth £27,000.
Haste also has options on 3 million shares with an exercise price of 59p and 1.3 million shares with an exercise price of 92.4p.
According to a report the size of Haste’s pay packet reflects the difficulty R&SA had in securing a new chief executive. The company was left without a permanent chief executive for seven months after the departure of Bob Mendelsohn.
News of Haste’s salary follows reports yesterday that Aviva bosses had been attacked by small shareholders at the company AGM over the size of their salaries.
Aviva chief executive Richard Harvey was paid £1.1m last year, including a bonus of £312,000. Harvey said the company had turned the corner, but was attacked by small shareholders and investors who said they had yet to see the benefit of the merger of Norwich Union and Commercial Union.
According to a report, investor John Farmer asked the Aviva board how they could justify paying executive directors over £1.1m in bonuses given the company’s “poor long term performance”.
