RUTH SUNDERLAND: How Huw Edwards could be deprived of his salary
Fallen star: Former BBC presenter Huw Edwards
The BBC should follow the example of British business and strip Huw Edwards of his salary.
Many pay-TV broadcasters will be wondering why the embattled newsreader was still being paid £200,000 after his arrest for child abuse in November last year.
Director-general Tim Davie has said the BBC will explore all options to get some of the money back, but that this will be “legally challenging”.
That sentence sounds like Davie has given up before he even started, but he should still try with all his might to earn the money back.
Relieving disloyal top executives of money they should never have received in the first place has become a welcome fact of life in the FTSE 100.
After the financial crisis, new rules were introduced, such as ‘malus’ and ‘clawback’, to prevent bosses from running away with millions they were not entitled to.
Clawback, as the name suggests, means that incentives and bonuses that have already been given are taken back and that incentives and bonuses that have not yet been paid out are cancelled.
Malus is the opposite of a bonus: essentially a reduction or forfeiture of a performance-related reward.
One of the biggest losers in recent times under these provisions has been ex-BP boss Bernard Looney, who knowingly misled his board about personal relationships with colleagues, costing him more than £32 million.
Sebastien de Montessus, the former CEO of Endeavour Mining, also paid a heavy price. His former employer said earlier this year that he wanted to claw back more than $29 million (£23 million) in salary and other benefits after he was dismissed for alleged serious misconduct over an ‘irregular payment’.
A dinner misstep cost Alison Rose, then a NatWest bank director, £7.6m in damages, which she would have received had she not spoken to a BBC editor about Nigel Farage’s bank account.
In the US, the financial penalty can be very painful.
Just ask Steve Easterbrook, the British-born former CEO of McDonald’s, who returned $105 million (£82 million) worth of cash and stock after an investigation found he had secret relationships with staff.
Clearly the BBC is not the same.
In boardrooms, pay consists of a relatively small sum of money – though often in the hundreds – plus a range of much larger bonuses and incentive programs.
Some of these take several years to mature, so it is quite easy to eliminate those that have not yet borne fruit. It is much harder to get back money that has already been paid.
BBC staff are not offered share bonuses, so in Edwards’ case it would mean approaching him for cash or pressuring him to pay the money back, as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has suggested.
His pension is almost impossible to confiscate. Fred Goodwin, the man behind the collapse of RBS, has kept his huge pension pot despite nearly collapsing the British financial system. He receives around £545,000 a year.
It is, in Davie’s words, “legally challenging” for companies to pursue wealthy, litigious, well-connected CEOs for malus and clawback. These former bosses are multimillionaires and can unleash legal attack dogs on their former employers.
But FTSE 100 companies are becoming more assertive when it comes to clawing back undeserved rewards from disgraced top executives.
This is bringing about a positive change in business culture in the UK.
The BBC should follow this example.
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