The Herald: Shell investors advised to vote against pay report

PAUL ROGERSON, City Editor May 10 2007

CORPORATE governance consultancy Pirc has recommended Royal Dutch Shell investors vote against the company’s remuneration report at its annual meeting on Tuesday.

The adviser claims that awards under the company’s bonus plans are “potentially obsessive” and performance targets are insufficiently taxing.

Pirc pointed out Royal Dutch Shell does not disclose the performance conditions attached to outstanding share awards. It added: “Taking the LTIP (long-term incentive plan) and the deferred bonus plan in conjunction, vesting targets are not sufficiently challenging in light of the level of the award. We also have concerns over the vesting scale and the small size of the comparator group.”

Pirc described the scope for combined awards as “potentially excessive”, and noted no awards had vested under the most recently completed LTIP performance period.

Royal Dutch Shell is not alone among energy giants recently criticised for their directors’ pay policies. In March local authority pension funds said they would vote against BP’s remuneration report as a result of its failure to clearly tie executive rewards to safety performance.

Comment posted by: John Donovan, Colchester UK on 8:20am today

Directors Pay: If you put to one side the high profits generated by high oil prices – the one factor outside of the control of Shell Directors – it has been a case of one debacle after another. Jeroen van der Veer has suffered humiliation in Venezuela at the hands of Hugo Chavez and on the Sakhalin-2 project at the hands of Putin. His reaction was to thank both gentlemen for being mugged. The Irish troubles persist after Shell made heroes of five protestors by having them jailed for 94 days and then faced more humiliation when forced to apologise to those gentleman, now world famous as “The Rossport Five”. One has just received a Goldman environmental reward. And the Corrib pipeline dispute is still making negative news headlines for Shell on a global basis.

Bearing in mind all of the other controversies listed on the Wikipedia article (link below) Shell Directors are displaying great audacity in putting forward the proposed remuneration packages.

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Royal_Dutch_Shell

Posted by John Donovan, co-owner of the website: http://royaldutchshellplc.com/

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