Circus scion named top-paid boss
A TOP City fund manager born into the Bertram Mills circus dynasty has been named as the highest-paid director of a publicly-quoted company.
Christopher Mills, chief executive of the obscure North Atlantic Smaller Companies Investment Trust but who also has a string of other directorships to his name, received a total package worth £4.87m last year.
The payout, which compares with £1.62m the previous year, exceeds even those received by such remuneration big-hitters as Vodafone's Sir Christopher Gent and Reckitt Benckiser's Bart Becht.
Mills, 50, who has been a senior City fund manager for more than 25 years, is a founder and chief investment officer of investment group JO Hambro Capital Management.
His package, which comprises a basic fee of just £10,000 topped up by a 40% cut of investors' fees and a performance fee, was massively boosted by a £3.5m one-off payment.
This was triggered by the scrapping of Mills's outstanding 900,000 shares options and their replacement with a new option scheme. Under the terms of his contract, Mills was entitled to the notional 'value' of the options at the time they were cancelled.
Mills, a grandson of circus impresario Bertram Mills, is known as one of the City's most powerful fund managers with the ability to make or break company management teams on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently embroiled in a takeover bid for specialist book publisher Quarto.
The survey, conducted by the journal Labour Research, found that there are now a record 568 directors of public companies earning £500,000 or more with a combined pay package of around £515m. Their average pay increase last year was 12.4%, the ninth consecutive year of double digit growth. The report said: 'The bonanza in boardroom pay which has been running since the mid-1990s shows no signs of abating.'
After Mills, the top earners were Stanley Fink of hedge fund managers Man Group on £3.8m, up 18.5% on the previous year; Michael Spencer of City money broker ICAP (£3.7m, up 72.7%); Martin Bandier of music group EMI (£3.5m, down 5.3%) David Harding of bookies William Hill (£3.4m, up 615.9%)
Lawrence Fish of Royal Bank of Scotland (£3.4m, up 51.5%) BP's Lord Browne of Madingley (£3m, down 0.2%) Gent (£2.9m, up 19.9%) Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco (£2.8m up 15.5%) and David Reid, also of Tesco (£2.6m, up 31.2%).
