By Steinar Schjetne/NTB

– Executive salaries are too high, especially in the US. There we see that the size of the salary package is only increasing and increasing, said Carine Smith Ihenacho director for ownership and compliance at NBIM – Norges Bank Investment Management during the presentation of semi-annual figures for oil funds on Wednesday.

The Norwegian Government’s overseas pension fund rejected a total of 142 proposals relating to the salaries of CEOs and managing directors of American companies during the first two quarters of this year. The fund believes that the salary packages that boards will offer company directors are often too complicated and too generous.

In 82 cases, the reason the fund chose not was because the salary package was too expensive and because there were major concerns about how to put it together.

In total, fund representatives vote against every tenth salary package proposal at the company in which it is invested.

– This year we are even stricter with the highest salary package. We would like to see a better correlation between wages and returns, says Ihenacho.

[ Dagsavisen mener: Noe burde vært gjort med bankenes enorme renteinntekter ]

– Stole our money

Director salaries in the US are among the highest in the world and have increased significantly since the 1980s, NBIM pointed out in a report on holding exercise that came out with the results report.

But the average salary for regular employees has increased by about the same. While the average director’s salary in the US in 1965 was 20 times higher than the average employee’s salary, in 2021 directors’ salaries are 399 times higher than workers’ salaries.

By that time, the average salary of the CEOs of the 500 largest companies had risen to 15 million dollars – that is, about 150 million kroner.

In 2021, the fund is going against Apple CEO Tim Cook’s astronomical salary package. Last year they also opposed Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey’s pay package, and have also done the same at tech giants IBM and Intel.

During the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, oil fund manager Nicolai Tangen had this to say E24 that “in most cases, senior management is stealing our money in broad daylight.”

– Although the US is home to many of the world’s most valuable companies, there is evidence to suggest that higher CEO salaries are not necessarily associated with higher performance, writes NBIM in the report.

There are no transfer bonuses

Oil funds are particularly critical of the so-called “golden halo” – large one-off payments at the start of a working relationship that are often compared to signing and transfer bonuses.

In its new guidelines for the preferred composition of executive pay packages, NBIM advocates a simpler structure, in which performance-based bonuses and incentives should have a long-term goal of value creation for the company and shareholders.

– We will not support any salary package that rewards senior managers with stock for a term that we believe is too short or contains a large one-off payment. We will also vote against packages that seem unnecessarily expensive and where we are concerned about the composition of the salary arrangement and/or how it relates to performance and results, said the ownership report.

Fund representatives voted for more than 95,000 resolutions at more than 8,000 company meetings in the first half of the year. NBIM representatives vote against the proposal approximately every third general meeting. This corresponds to about 5 percent of all proposals voted on by representatives.

– We are investors who mostly support companies, but not always, says Ihenacho.

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[ MS: – Det som overrasker mest, er hvor stor den tapte arbeidsevnen er ]