Stellantis chief’s pay angers shareholders

The gigantic compensation bundle of the CEO of US-European automaker Stellantis was impacted by certain investors and crawled its direction into the French official mission on Wednesday.

Stellantis says CEO Carlos Tavares is expected to get 19 million euros ($20.6 million) for 2021, the year that France’s PSA (Peugeot-Citroen-Opel) and Italian-American gathering Fiat-Chrysler converged to shape the world’s fourth biggest automaker.

Past his base compensation of 2,000,000 euros, Tavares is to get 7.5 million euros in execution based pay, 2.4 million euros in retirement commitments and a 1.7-million-euro reward connected with the outcome of the consolidation.

He will also receive 5.6 million euros worth of company shares, according to Stellantis.

But activist investor group Phitrust voted against the remuneration on Tuesday, saying that, according to its own calculations, Tavares could get as much as a whopping 66 million euros in cash and shares — a figure rejected by Stellantis as “wrong”.

“These are obviously not normal figures,” said government spokesman Gabriel Attal.

“We must continue to act at the European level,” he said, citing efforts to impose a minimum tax on big companies or promoting profit-sharing.

Far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was also drawn into the issue, saying: “It’s shocking, but less shocking than for others”.

“For once he obtained good results,” said Le Pen, who is facing President Emmanuel Macron in a runoff on April 24 after finishing second in the first round on Sunday.

Stellantis, which was holding its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, posted a net profit of 13.4 billion euros for 2021 despite the car industry seeing its recovery from the Covid-19 crisis crimped by a shortage of semiconductors.

Activist investor group Phitrust, a minority shareholder, took issue with the valuation of the stocks granted to Tavares.

It said that if calculated using the methodology of French market regulators “the total amount of the remuneration of the CEO of Stellantis granted for 2021 would amount to 66 million (euros)”.

The group questioned whether the pay package was “justified for a person who is not the creator of the company, but is only its manager and therefore does not take any risk or financial penalty or assume any personal responsibility, especially as the merger of the two groups is not yet completed?”.

It additionally found out if such compensation was socially supported given that Stellantis was probably going to require eliminated positions because of overcapacity following the consolidation.

The CFDT association said the remuneration bundle was “difficult to accept for workers who are approached to put forth seriousness attempts consistently”.