Ryanair chief executive, Michael O\u2019Leary, is to receive a 50 per cent increase in basic pay to \u20ac1.8 million per annum as part of his new four-year contract agreed to 2032.<\/p>\n
The new pay deal for the high-profile O\u2019Leary works out at \u20ac4,931 per day or \u20ac34,615 per week before bonuses and share options are taken into account.<\/p>\n
Last Friday, Ryanair announced the contract extension with O\u2019Leary, with the airline stating that it contains a \u201cmodest annual salary and a capped annual bonus\u201d.<\/p>\n
Now, the airline\u2019s 2026 annual report published on Monday provides further detail.<\/p>\n
It states that arising from the new contract from FY28, O\u2019Leary\u2019s basic salary will rise from \u20ac1.2 million to \u20ac1.8m million per annum, with no further increases over the term of the contract and it also contains a maximum annual bonus that will be capped at no more than 50 per cent of basic pay.<\/p>\n
The annual report states that Ryanair\u2019s remuneration committee (RemCo) recognises that this one off 50 per cent salary increase in FY28 appears significant, but is satisfied that the increase is merited as it represents an annual increase of only c.4.5 per cent p.a. over the combined nine-year term of the Group CEO\u2019s current and future contracts.<\/p>\n
The Remco also state that when combined with a modest bonus cap of 50 per cent of salary, compared to 200 per cent typically offered to CEOs in similar sized companies, and nil pension, O\u2019Leary overall annual cash remuneration is among lower quartile when compared to CEO packages at other Irish\/UK companies of similar size.<\/p>\n
The new contract also includes a one-off option for O\u2019Leary to purchase 10m shares, structured along similar lines to the 2019 purchase options.<\/p>\n
The options will be exercisable at a strike price of \u20ac26.70\/$65.00, but only if the Ryanair Group profit after tax grows to over \u20ac4 billion in any year up to FY32 or if the price of either the company\u2019s ordinary share exceed \u20ac42 for a period of 28 consecutive calendar days during the period FY27 to FY32.<\/p>\n
Remco state that it recognises that this option award is somewhat unusual when compared to long-term incentive structures typically used for senior executives in listed companies, “but believes this structure better reflects what is required to motivate and retain a highly entrepreneurial and exceptional leader like Mr O\u2019Leary”.<\/p>\n
The annual report states that there is significant shareholder support for O\u2019Leary\u2019s contract extension and feedback received from this exercise was considered when finalising the ambitious share option performance targets.<\/p>\n
The report discloses that O\u2019Leary\u2019s pay-package of \u20ac3.83 million for the 12 months to the end of March this year remained unchanged from last year.<\/p>\n
The package included bonus payments of \u20ac600,000, basic pay of \u20ac1.2 million and share options of \u20ac2.03 million.<\/p>\n
A note attached to the accounts states that the \u20ac2.03 million component is through the company recording a technical non-cash accounting charge in relation to share options granted to O\u2019Leary.<\/p>\n
The note states that no such payment was made to O\u2019Leary.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Leary\u2019s pay remained unchanged against the background of the most successful in the 40-year history of Ryanair, with record traffic of 208 million passengers and record profits of \u20ac2.26 billion.<\/p>\n
The annual report shows that Ryanair\u2019s Irish based revenues this year increased by 18 per cent from \u20ac757.4 million to \u20ac896.6 million.<\/p>\n
The airline\u2019s Irish business accounted for 5.7 per cent of overall revenues of \u20ac15.54 billion as Italy remained the airline\u2019s most lucrative market at \u20ac3.36 billion, followed by Spain at \u20ac2.69 billion and UK revenues of \u20ac2.27 billion.<\/p>\n
In his message to shareholders, O\u2019Leary said that “from FY30 onward, when we start taking to up 50 aircraft annually, we expect to deliver traffic growth of 15 million guests p.a., leaving us well placed to hit our target of 300 million passengers by FY34”.<\/p>\n
The total amount of remuneration paid to senior key management amounted to \u20ac16.7 million in FY26 compared to \u20ac14.7 million last year and that included this year a \u20ac5.9 million non-cash technical accounting charge in relation to unvested share options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryanair chief executive, Michael O\u2019Leary, is to receive a 50 per cent increase in basic pay to \u20ac1.8…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":["post-513270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}