70% pay rise for Rio Tinto boss threatens revolt

Rio Tinto is facing a shareholder revolt next week after the CEO’s salary was increased by 70 percent.

Jakob Stausholm took home £4.8 million in 2022, up from £2.8 million the year before, after the mining giant posted record profits thanks to rising commodity prices.

But analysts from the proxy advisory group Pirc have urged investors to vote against the FTSE 100 group’s remuneration scheme. It also recommended a vote against re-election of senior independent director Sam Laidlaw, former CEO of Centrica, who chairs Rio Tinto’s remuneration committee.

The advisory group, meanwhile, has told shareholders to abstain from voting for sustainability committee head Megan Clark, who is up for re-election, as questions remain over plans for the miner to build a massive copper mine in Arizona on sacred Apache country.

Rio Tinto intends to do this through a company it co-owns with BHP called Resolution Copper.

A U.S. Congressman, Raul Grijalva, recently introduced a bill to protect the Oak Flat site that would halt Resolution’s creation of the mine.

It is unlikely that any revolt over rewards will be on the scale of the shareholder revolt in 2021, when more than 60 per cent of investors voted against plans to give former boss Jean Sebastien-Jacques a £7.2 million bonus.

He was forced out after the company blew up two 46,000-year-old Aboriginal sacred sites in Western Australia to expand an iron ore mine.

This sparked global outcry and an Australian parliamentary inquiry, as well as an evacuation of the boardroom.

Campaigners have questioned why Rio has not abandoned plans to build the Resolution Copper mine, which would harm another sacred site, while bosses have vowed never to destroy indigenous heritage again.