The Totalenergies board of directors indicated this Thursday that it will propose at the general meeting of shareholders on May 26 a 10% increase in the remuneration of its CEO Patrick Pouyanné, criticized last year for his salary statements.
The board will file a motion stating that it “proposes to increase compensation and performance share allocation by 10% by 2023 from 2022,” according to a group press release on the call for this general meeting.
This is an “equivalent increase to that benefited on average by executives from the common social base in France,” the group said.
Increase in the number of shares assigned
The increase comes from the increase in the number of shares assigned to the CEO, the fixed remuneration of 1.5 million euros and the variable without changes, a Totalenergies source said.
In 2021, Patrick Pouyanné’s remuneration had increased by 51.7%, to 5,944,129 euros, an amount at the center of a controversy in the fall amid a salary dispute at the group’s refineries.
This increase followed a 36.4% drop in his remuneration in 2020, the result of a salary cut then presented as “voluntary” during the health crisis, and the decrease in the variable part of his salary that year linked to the results of the cluster.
In 2019, the year before the pandemic, it amounted to 6.15 million euros, while the total salary for 2022 has not yet been published.
“It is not me who sets my remuneration, but the Totalenergies Board of Directors who sets it and the shareholders who approve it – it is certainly high, but comparable to my peers in the CAC40 and much lower than that of the other European majors[ne]sy american[e]s” of the petrochemical sector, the CEO later defended on Twitter.
Source: BFM TV
