Shareholders are being ripped off by boards – it's time they spoke up

This week the £1.3m 'reward for failure' of departing Gartmore CEO Jeff Meyer has been publicly criticised by a well-known figure in the City. It's high time more people started speaking up about such gross misuse of shareholders' money.

Is it better to rip lots of people off and give some of your gains to charity or better to rip no one off in the first place? You'd think, if pushed, that the Church would go with the second. So I've been waiting for its leaders to say something about pay in the financial sector.

After all, while the idea that making money and morality are perfectly compatible is easily argued, it isn't so easy to make a moral case that excuses the ludicrous levels of executive pay in the financial and big corporate sectors. People have tried (think Stephen Green and Philip Richards) but in the end the fact remains that if you overpay a fund manager you rip off investors and if you overpay a CEO you rip off shareholders.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.