This is news that is not likely to calm the social uproar in France. The board of directors of TotalEnergies indicated on Thursday that it would propose at the general meeting of shareholders on May 26 a 10% increase in the remuneration of its CEO Patrick Pouyanné.
The board will submit a motion providing that “the compensation and the allocation of performance shares for 2023 are proposed to increase by 10% compared to 2022”, according to a press release from the group on the convening of this general meeting. This is an “increase equivalent to that which benefited on average the executives of the common social base in France”, specified the group. The CEO’s total compensation in 2022 has not yet been released.
In 2021, Patrick Pouyanné’s compensation had increased by 51.7%, to 5,944,129 euros – an amount at the heart of a controversy last fall in the midst of a wage dispute in the group’s refineries. This increase followed a 36.4% drop in his compensation in 2020, the result of a salary cut then presented as “voluntary” during the health crisis, and the decline in the variable part of his salary that year linked group results. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, it amounted to 6.15 million euros.
“It is not me who sets my compensation, but the Board of Directors of TotalEnergies which sets it and the shareholders who approve it – it is certainly high, but comparable to my peers in the CAC 40 and much lower than that other European majors [ne] s and american [e] s” of the petrochemical sector, had defended the CEO on Twitter.
The increase mentioned this Thursday comes on the one hand from the increase in salary of 10%, on the variable part – the fixed remuneration of 1.5 million euros not changing; and on the other hand the 10% increase in the number of performance shares, said a source at TotalEnergies.
The group’s executives benefit from an increase of 7.5% in salary and 15% in the variable part and in bonuses, or on average nearly 10%, specifies the company. The budget for the number of performance shares allocated to non-executive managers also increases by 10%, the group said.