Shareholders are growing increasingly frustrated at the failure of boards to step in when a chief executive is underperforming. Just look at that share price: 240p as of yesterday – almost a quarter below where it was when Laury took charge more than four years ago. The chairman should have acted sooner. Time for some DIY SOS. Companies should know by now how to handle a pay row, or rather how not to. There was enough material from Jeff Fairburn’s ignominious exit at Persimmon to write an entire manual. Perhaps the folks at Lloyds haven’t done their homework because its response to criticism over chief António Horta-Osório’s pension doesn’t cut the mustard. Essentially, there are two ways to respond to criticism. Either defend management pay levels on the basis that they have been legitimately earned; or perform a total climbdown whereby bosses repent and agree to to hand back a significant chunk of their benefits. Lloyds chose the Fairburn approach: a token gesture that risks enraging critics even more. Horta-Osório receives a payment equivalent to 33pc of base pay, compared with a maximum of 13pc for most staff. And the icing on the cake: in an organisation employing nearly 75,000 people, the Portuguese is the only person qualifying for a second, defined benefit pension, an arrangement that was ended for every other member of staff five years ago. Reports that fed up branch staff refer to him as “Two Pensions Osório” are hardly surprising.
Veronique Laury oversaw some essential but fairly routine changes at Kingfisher, but the company required more than an overhaul of stale operational practices, reported Ben Marlow in The Telegraph. In a statement to Mashable, Kingfish said it was "disappointed" by the decision. Long-term questions over B&Q are likely to resurface, as well as more radical calls to break up the company, but a break-up risks greater disruption at a point when the company needs stability.