Want the best CEO? Here’s how much it will cost

Royal Dutch Shell shareholders are not too pleased about CEO Ben van Beurden’s 8.9 million euro (about $10.56 million) annual pay package, with advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) urging investors to reject the company’s executive compensation plan, while the Financial Times has reported that a top 20 shareholder will vote against the latest executive pay package, due to “questionable” performance on investor returns.

The vote on pay will be next week, and if shareholders reject the executive’s pay package, it won’t be the first time this year that a major pay package has been rejected.

In March, Walt Disney shareholders rejected an executive compensation package for CEO Bob Iger that could have been worth $48.5 million a year over four years, plus a grant worth about $100 million, contingent on the successful completion of the purchase of certain 21st Century Fox assets.

As reported by Reuters, 52% of shareholders voted against the compensation for Iger and other executives, 44% voted in favor and 4% abstained.

Other top executives, including Tesla’s Elon Musk and AIG’s Brian Duperreault recently had their pay packages approved by shareholders.

Corporate boards have tried for years to come up with successful ways to link executive compensation to stock performance, but their efforts have not necessarily been met with success.

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from MyLogIQ LLC and ISS in 2017, among S&P 500 CEOs who received raises, 10% who received the biggest pay increases scored in the middle of the pack in terms of total shareholder return, whereas 10% of companies posting the best total shareholder returns offered their CEOs pay that was in the middle of the pack.