He may have had the last laugh upon hearing the recent news about the collapse of merger between Publicis and Omnicom, but Martin Sorrell is now laughing all the way to the bank after shareholders this week narrowly approved of his whopping £29.8m pay package for 2013.
The £29.8m is a 70% increase on the £18m he received in 2012. As one shareholder put it, this works out at approximately £24,000 an hour.
However, the package was defended by Jeffrey Rosen, the outgoing chairman of the remuneration committee, who said that 80% of Sorrell’s pay was based on a five-year incentive scheme “which performed exactly as it was meant to perform”.
During the AGM, which took place in the Shard building in London, WPP announced that revenues for the first five months of 2014 were up 1.2% to £4.43 billion and that like-for-like revenues, profits and revenue margin were ahead of last year and in line with the company’s targets.
