The
former chief executive of HR consultancy Hays took home more than £1m last
year, including £103,000 for loss of office, even though he restructured
himself out of a job and walked straight into a new one.
Colin
Matthews also got to keep his 600,000 share options in the company, which are
currently showing a paper profit of about £262,500, the company’s annual report
and accounts reveal.
Matthews
left Hays in June to join the water supplier Severn Trent after overseeing the
break-up of Hays and the disposal of its haulage and private postal divisions,
leaving it as a pure recruitment and HR company.
His
pay for the year of £1.025m was made up of £412,000 in base salary, a
performance bonus of £282,000, a cash pension top-up of £224,000 and the £103,000
compensation payment.
The
company defended Matthews’s payment for loss of office on the grounds that even
though his appointment to Severn Trent was announced on the same day that he
left Hays, he did not start his new job for three months.
A
spokesman told the Independent newspaper that, under his contract, Matthews had
been entitled to one year’s severance pay, but had volunteered to forego
three-quarters of that because it would have been "inequitable" to
have taken the full amount.
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