One of the City’s largest institutional investors has warned companies not to pay executive bonuses if they have taken government funds, cut jobs or scrapped shareholder dividends during the pandemic.
Legal & General Investment Management, which holds a stake in almost every UK-listed business, said that it would vote against pay reports in next year’s annual general meeting season if company boards flouted its guidance.
In one of the sternest warnings yet to big companies about how they handle the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, Sacha Sadan, director of corporate governance at LGIM, said that in some cases the fund manager would vote against a company’s remuneration report even if it had paid back taxpayer loans that it had received.
These would include when a
