Euan Sutherland, CEO of the British retail consumer group The Co-operative, has spoken out after details of his £3.6 million salary were leaked last week.
Through a proposal leaked to the Observer newspaper last week, it emerged that under new deal the chief executive, Euan Sutherland, will receive a base salary of £1.5 million and a matching retention bonus of £1.5 million, to be paid regardless of performance in both 2013 and 2014.
His predecessor Peter Marks earned just £1.3 million last year.
Mr Sutherland took to the Co-op’s workers’ Facebook page to have his say. He said: “We seem to have an individual, or individuals, determined to undermine me personally, my team and the rest of the group board regardless of the uncertainty and disruption this causes to our 90,000 colleagues and our supportive members.”
He added: “I wish I could promise you that this kind of occurrence will not happen again. You deserve to hear information in a proper, orderly and considered fashion. But we appear to have disaffected people who are determined to make life difficult and embarrassing for The Co-operative at a time when what we need most are professionalism and loyalty to the business.”
The Co-op's board has recently approved plans to double the pay of its top team for the next two years despite the near-collapse of its banking arm and plans to make 5,000 staff redundant as it faces annual losses of more than £2 billion.
The mutual is currently reeling from a series of scandals including the discovery late last year of a £1.5 billion deficit in its banking operations and criminal allegations regarding it's chairman, Reverand Paul Flowers.
Co-op Group chair Ursula Lidbetter said: “The remuneration packages of our executives are in the middle of a range of comparable companies. This represents an increase on the pay of their predecessors to reflect the greater commercial, management and turnaround experience they are bringing to bear."
© 2014 - European Supermarket Magazine by Enda Dowling
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