AstraZeneca chief exec Pascal Soriot earns £120m in 10 years

Astrazeneca boss Pascal Soriot was paid £15.3 million in salary last year, bringing his total earnings in just over a decade at the pharmaceutical giant to nearly £120 million.

The CEO’s 2022 package is the fourth year in a row that he has earned more than £15 million, but it was slightly less than the £15.7 million he received in 2021.

His package included a salary of £1.4 million, £13.6 million in bonuses, benefits worth £136,000 and £150,000 in pension contributions.

The total was 230 times the amount a typical AstraZeneca employee receives.

Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, said: ‘These are really disturbing numbers.

A £15 million reward, bringing Soriot’s total salary over the last ten years to more than £100 million, is a highly unusual amount for someone who is merely a manager of an established organisation, not an entrepreneur who has built it from scratch .’

Soriot is one of the UK’s best-known CEOs and has been at the helm of the company since October 2012.

In that time, wages have been a constant concern for the Frenchman, who has complained that bosses at rivals abroad were making more.

In 2018, after receiving a £13 million reward, Soriot caused a stir when he said: ‘The truth is that I am the lowest paid CEO in the whole industry.

“It’s annoying to a certain extent. But in the end it is what it is.’

The 63-year-old’s latest payout comes just two weeks after he shed light on Britain’s uncompetitive tax regime.

At the company’s full-year results on February 9, Soriot blamed the high cost of doing business in Britain that had prompted AstraZeneca to shift plans for a £330 million investment in a new manufacturing facility to Ireland.

Soriot said the group wanted to build a new “state-of-the-art” factory close to existing sites in the North West, but chose Ireland instead because the UK tax regime was “disheartening”.

Corporate tax in the UK will be raised from 19% in April to 25%.

Despite never being far from controversy, Soriot is credited with leading a turnaround that transformed AstraZeneca’s image from laggard to trailblazer, with a formidable portfolio of blockbuster drugs.

The company became a household name during Covid when it joined forces with Oxford University to produce a jab that sold for no profit – although Soriot has annoyed investors by spending much of the pandemic at his childhood home in Australia.

Before that, he saw a £69 billion raid in 2014 by US rival Pfizer, which wanted to buy AstraZeneca and use the UK as its headquarters for tax purposes.

Today, AstraZeneca is valued at nearly £178 billion after a nearly 300 per cent rise in its share price since Soriot took over.