Congratulations to Aviva shareholders for duffing up the fat-cats

I have some money invested in an Aviva financial product – and it’s doing very badly. So I was utterly delighted to hear that that the company’s shareholders used today’s AGM to knee its executives violently in the groin over the amount the greedy bastards pay themselves.

The rewards offered to the company’s new chief executive, Trevor Matthews, appear to have been the final straw. His annual salary is £720,000 a year (peanuts in financial circles, obviously). But when he joined the company he was given a £470,000 cash payment, £2.02m worth of shares and £35,280 to pay his legal fees. As that little lot evidently wasn’t enough to compensate the man for the sheer awfulness of having to work for Aviva, he received a £45,000 bonus for toiling for the company for precisely one month (long service loyalty bonus, I expect).

Well, the shareholders – who’ve seen the value of their shares drop by a quarter during the past year – have decided that enough's enough. 54% of them voted against today’s remuneration report.

It’s only the fourth time in history that a FTSE 100 company has had its remuneration report voted down.

What with holders of 26.9% of Barclays shares voting against its remuneration report last week, the winds of change appear to be blowing up the pin-striped trouser-legs of the truffling pigs who run our major financial institutions.

Good!

I’m not usually in the least bit envious of what people get paid (unless I'm footing the bill) – but the attitude of financial sector poo-bahs is symptomatic of an widespread belief among the oligarchs who run this country that the rest of us are a tedious irrelevance to their primary goal of amassing as much loot as they can for their old age. Worse, their habit of decoupling rewards from actual performance make it a lot harder for those of us who support the free market and are against government interference to maintain our enthusiasm for defending (the case being that the alternatives simply don’t work).

The rule seems simple enough to me: make a fortune for other people and do right by your customers, then pay yourself a fortune - i.e. until you stop losing me money, keep your rapaciousness in check!