Pro Cuts Directors still Paying themselves Very Well

I said in a recent post that I would try to find out just how much the Procuts 35 take as salary, sometimes from themselves.

Here are the figures.

Will Adderley, CEO, Dunelm Group - gets paid £350,000 p.a.
Robert Bensoussan, Chairman, L.K. Bennett
Andy Bond, Chairman, Asda - now with Republic Fashion Stores
Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher - gets paid £1,972,100 p.a.
Gerald Corbett, Chairman, SSL International, moneysupermarket.com, Britvic - £215,000 from MoneySupermarket.com (2008) others to be confirmed
Peter Cullum, Executive Chairman, Towergate - gets paid £167,140 p.a.
Tej Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, Dhillon Group - n/k
Philip Dilley, Chairman, Arup - n/k
Charles Dunstone, Chairman, Carphone Warehouse Group, TalkTalk Telecom Group got £240,000 in fees as chairman of Carphone and £360,000 as chairman of TalkTalk
Warren East, CEO, ARM Holdings gets paid £1,436,097 p.a.
Gordon Frazer, Managing Director, Microsoft UK - n/k
Sir Christopher Gent, Non-Executive Chairman, GlaxoSmithKline - n/k
Ben Gordon, Chief Executive, Mothercare - has announced his intention step down on November 17th, was on an annual salary of £600,000, but picked up £5.2million including share incentive payments in the year to March 2011
Anthony Habgood, Chairman, Whitbread, Chairman, Reed Elsevier gets paid £500,000 p.a.
Aidan Heavey, Chief Executive, Tullow Oil gets paid £1,670,909 p.a.
Neil Johnson, Chairman, UMECO gets paid £240,000 p.a.
Nick Leslau, Chairman, Prestbury Group - no salary figures but recently paid £156M for St Katherine's Dock in London
Ian Livingston, CEO, BT Group gets paid £2.36M p.a.
Ruby McGregor-Smith, CEO, MITIE Group- gets paid £1,229,000 p.a. most of this coming from public sector contracts, i,e, YOUR taxes
Rick Medlock, CFO, Inmarsat; Non-Executive Director lovefilms.com, The Betting Group - gets paid £597,000
John Nelson, Chairman, Hammerson gets paid £597,000 p.a.
Stefano Pessina, Executive Chairman, Alliance Boots - pays himself £693,000 p.a.
Nick Prest, Chairman, AVEVA - pays himself £85,000 p.a (2009)
Nick Robertson, CEO, ASOS - pays himself £341,706 p.a.
Sir Stuart Rose, Chairman, Marks & Spencer - no longer at M&S
Tim Steiner, CEO, Ocado - pays himself £646,000 which includes a bonus of £220,000, not bad for running a company that can't turn a profit and whose shares at close of play today (7/11/11) were worth 87.1p down from £2.50 in February.
Andrew Sukawaty, Chairman and CEO, Inmarsat gets paid £1,478,000 p.a.
Michael Turner, Executive Chairman, Fuller, Smith and Turner gets paid £590,000 p.a.
Moni Varma, Chairman, Veetee - n/k
Paul Walker, Chief Executive, Sage - Now left Sage
Paul Walsh, Chief Executive, Diageo gets pAID £3,183,000 p.a.
Robert Walters, CEO, Robert Walters - n/k
Joseph Wan, Chief Executive, Harvey Nichols - n/k
Bob Wigley, Chairman, Expansys, Stonehaven Associates, Yell Group
Simon Wolfson, Chief Executive, Next - gets paid £1,757,000 p.a.

Lowest confirmed annual pay of the Procuts 35 is £167,140 p.a. making all the people named above in the top 1% of the country for large pay packets.

The rest of us, to borrow a slogan from the Occupy protests, are the 99% and these people are not representative of us nor act in out interests. Please boycott their businesses. Don't fund your own oppression.

The source for most of these figures is businessweek.com and are from various dates within 2011 unless stated, others are gleamed from news stories. As you can see it's not possible with ease to discover what all these people earn. If you know of any other sources where I can check or double-check these figures I'd be glad to hear about them.

Boycott Republic Fashion Stores

Andy Bond was Chairman of ASDA when the boycott of the businesses of the Procuts 35 started. He is now the Chairman of the Private Equity Funded 'Republic' fashion chain.

Back in April Andy seemed to acknowledge the recession predicting that the recession in retail will continue for another two years from that point. He has not however retracted his initial statement that the private sector (currently in recession and facing a crisis in confidence, job losses and issuing profit warnings excepted for the greedy bastards increasing their own pay by 50% just to prove to rest of us what a bunch of uncaring, ruthless bastards they really are) will magically step in and provide jobs for the millions of public sector workers Andy wanted to see sacked.

For this reason I am extending the boycott to include 'Republic'. Andy, you can run, but you can't hide. Any business you are associated with is now tainted by your public position.

Director's Pay Continues to Rise

There's a report out today that shows that the claims of the millionaire cabinet that everyone has to suffer in the current economic climate is a pile of lying hogwash.

FTSE 100 director's earnings rose by almost half last year

I won't repeat the report here but suggest that you read it.

The question to be asked is how to respond to this outrage. Well in the pages of this blog I have, where available, included the details of the salaries and remuneration packages of the Procuts 35 who said that public sector workers, including their own customers, should be sacked to pay for excesses of the banks.

Well I intend to update and re-publish details of the earnings of these people just to show that when they said that cuts had to be made they did not mean to their own salaries, the hypocritical swine that they are.

I've been busy on other projects most of this year but winter is setting in and now I have time to hunt these people down and expose their greed and I will delight in doing so. Stay tuned for updates.

Here are the latest figures for the annual earnings of the Procuts 35. Those with nothing next to them yet will be added shortly.

Will Adderley, CEO, Dunelm Group - gets paid £350,000 p.a.
Robert Bensoussan, Chairman, L.K. Bennett
Andy Bond, Chairman, Asda - now with Republic Fashion Stores
Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher - gets paid £1,972,100 p.a.
Gerald Corbett, Chairman, SSL International, moneysupermarket.com, Britvic - £215,000 from MoneySupermarket.com (2008) others to be confirmed
Peter Cullum, Executive Chairman, Towergate - gets paid £167,140 p.a.
Tej Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, Dhillon Group - n/k
Philip Dilley, Chairman, Arup - n/k
Charles Dunstone, Chairman, Carphone Warehouse Group, TalkTalk Telecom Group got £240,000 in fees as chairman of Carphone and £360,000 as chairman of TalkTalk
Warren East, CEO, ARM Holdings gets paid £1,436,097 p.a.
Gordon Frazer, Managing Director, Microsoft UK - n/k
Sir Christopher Gent, Non-Executive Chairman, GlaxoSmithKline - n/k
Ben Gordon, Chief Executive, Mothercare - has announced his intention step down on November 17th, was on an annual salary of £600,000, but picked up £5.2million including share incentive payments in the year to March 2011
Anthony Habgood, Chairman, Whitbread, Chairman, Reed Elsevier gets paid £500,000 p.a.
Aidan Heavey, Chief Executive, Tullow Oil gets paid £1,670,909 p.a.
Neil Johnson, Chairman, UMECO gets paid £240,000 p.a.
Nick Leslau, Chairman, Prestbury Group - no salary figures but recently paid £156M for St Katherine's Dock in London
Ian Livingston, CEO, BT Group gets paid £2.36M p.a.
Ruby McGregor-Smith, CEO, MITIE Group- gets paid £1,229,000 p.a. most of this coming from public sector contracts, i,e, YOUR taxes
Rick Medlock, CFO, Inmarsat; Non-Executive Director lovefilms.com, The Betting Group - gets paid £597,000
John Nelson, Chairman, Hammerson gets paid £597,000 p.a.
Stefano Pessina, Executive Chairman, Alliance Boots - pays himself £693,000 p.a.
Nick Prest, Chairman, AVEVA - pays himself £85,000 p.a (2009)
Nick Robertson, CEO, ASOS - pays himself £341,706 p.a.
Sir Stuart Rose, Chairman, Marks & Spencer - no longer at M&S
Tim Steiner, CEO, Ocado - pays himself £646,000 which includes a bonus of £220,000, not bad for running a company that can't turn a profit and whose shares at close of play today (7/11/11) were worth 87.1p down from £2.50 in February.
Andrew Sukawaty, Chairman and CEO, Inmarsat gets paid £1,478,000 p.a.
Michael Turner, Executive Chairman, Fuller, Smith and Turner gets paid £590,000 p.a.
Moni Varma, Chairman, Veetee - n/k
Paul Walker, Chief Executive, Sage - Now left Sage
Paul Walsh, Chief Executive, Diageo gets pAID £3,183,000 p.a.
Robert Walters, CEO, Robert Walters - n/k
Joseph Wan, Chief Executive, Harvey Nichols - n/k
Bob Wigley, Chairman, Expansys, Stonehaven Associates, Yell Group
Simon Wolfson, Chief Executive, Next - gets paid £1,757,000 p.a.

Lowest confirmed annual pay of the Procuts 35 is £167,140 p.a. making all the people named above in the top 1% of the country for large pay packets.

The rest of us, to borrow a slogan from the Occupy protests, are the 99% and these people are not representative of us nor act in out interests. Please boycott their businesses. Don't fund your own oppression.

The source for most of these figures is businessweek.com and are from various dates within 2011 unless stated, others are gleamed from news stories. As you can see it's not possible with ease to discover what all these people earn. If you know of any other sources where I can check or double-check these figures I'd be glad to hear about them.

The Power of Boycotts

People sometimes doubt the power of boycotts. They look at international conglomerates with multi-billion pound turnovers and wonder what possible difference their spending power can make.

This week we've seen the Power of Boycotts. News of the World, the biggest selling purveyor of tittle-tattle, sexual gossip, pro-Tory propaganda has been closed down as a result of a short lived but hard hitting boycott.

The News of World boycott differed from most commercial boycotts in that instead of targeting consumers it asked the News of the World's advertisers, its main source of income, to remove their ads from the paper.

Pressure to comply with the boycott was organised through Twitter and FaceBook and before any knew it advertisers were receiving thousands of message from customers saying were going to take their custom elsewhere if their ads remained in the paper. The advertisers soon realised that the News of the World had become a toxic brand and there was a virtual mob with virtual torches and pitchforks out for its blood.

The revelations that people at News International had been hacking into the phones of the families of murder victims and the families of dead soldiers was enough to turn the British public, who had tolerated the intrusion of the privacy of publicity seeking celebs and hypocritical politicians, against those responsible. The public roared, the advertisers listened and the paper was shut down by its ruthless owner, sacking the staff but keeping on board the person in charge at the time most of the offending events had taken place.

It was a partial victory for common decency but now people have tasted victory and the smell of blood is in their nostrils, they are not going to let things go.

It is suspected that News International will launch a new Sunday paper making this exercise more of a re-brand than a closure. The boycott campaign against the rest of News International has already begun with demands for a full and independent investigation of those responsible.

The links between News International and the Metropolitan Police make an investigation into these matters by the Met a potential whitewash. The investigation should be conducted by a senior appropriately skilled person or team with no connection to previous events from another force or even from Interpol should that be necessary and the cost of the investigation should be paid by News International.

We can make a difference; we know that now, so let's go after the ProCuts 35 with renewed vigour.

Boycott Virgin Media

This post marks a departure from the usual policy of only targeting the companies of the 35 business people who made their support of the cuts known in an open letter.

No one at Virgin Media signed that letter, so why am I now asking for people to boycott their services? Quite simply because they are absolutely useless.

Virgin Media provided my broadband until the end of January but the story begins in December

On December 16th the phone service stopped working. This was reported to Virgin Media via their online forum as I had no other way to contact them. The broadband was still online.

This forum is full of complaints from hundreds of Virgin Media customers who are not getting the service they have paid for.

Subsequently 4 separate appointments were made for engineers to attend to fix the problem before one finally turned up on 3rd January and fixed the problem which was in their control box a couple of street away.

All of the previous 3 appointments were cancelled on the day they were supposed to take place and notification of cancellation on two of them was only received after the time of the appointment. Two of those days involved me taking time off work to make the appointments. The reason given for one of the cancellations was the weather. It is true to say that we had some snow over that period, but I do not live in an isolated cottage in the middle of Dartmoor, I live in an out London suburb where the roads were gritted, the buses kept running and binmen collected the rubbish on schedule all through the winter.

I was without a phone service, which I had paid for, over Christmas and New Year during one of the coldest spells we have had in years. With two children in the house, one of whom is registered disabled, this was a situation that involved more risk than I found acceptable.

Within 5 minutes of the phone being re-connected I had a phone call from someone claiming to be from Virgin Media demanding my account password. This was not given of course.

These phone calls continued daily , and sometimes up to 5 times a day until I posted a notice on the forum telling Virgin Media that if they wasted any more of my time I would charge them. During one of these phones I was threatened by an employee of Virgin Media and demanded to speak to his supervisor. On this occasion that occurred and he agreed to end the calls. The calls continued but petered out shortly after.

During the time the phone was out of action I hadn't paid my December bill as that was my only leverage to ensure that a repair would eventually be completed.

After the third appointment was cancelled on the day it was supposed to take place I contacted Virgin Media from work and cancelled all my services with a switchover date of 31st January.

During that call, or a subsequent one around that time a closing balance on the account was agreed between myself and someone at Virgin Media that would cover my alleged services oup to 31st January.

Since then I have had threatening letters saying that I owe them a small balance.

The fact is that they owe me.

Their customer service is appaulling.

I phoned them on receipt of the most recent letter to try to resolve the issue by referring them to the previous agreement on the closing amount. The person I spoke to was abusive, rude and was unable to provide me with the Register Office address of Virgin Media so that I could formerly issue legal proceedings of my own. All Limited Companies have to have a registered office address. She also refused repeated requests to pass the call on to someone who could answer the question.

It took me one Google query to find out that Virgin Media's Register Office is Virgin Media Limited 160 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5QA.

One thing you should know about Virgin Media is that if you use the service you pay for they will cut back of your bandwidth. They advertise 'Speeds of up to 20MB' but as anyone with some technical knowledge of broadband knows this is rarely achievable and in Virgin's case is never reached. If you use your broadband a lot, by say letting the kids watch programs on the BBC iPlayer they will throttle back your bandwidth to a half or a quarter of what you pay for. They will not of course reduce your bill when they do this.

So basically, with Virgin Media we have a company that sell services, prevent you from fully utilising them, cannot fix faults within a reasonable period of time, threaten their customers and provide totally crap customer service.

They may not have signed the offending letter but those are enough reasons for me to advise anyone to steer clear of them.

There are other cable broadband provider if you wish to avoid paying BT phone line rentals charges. let me know if your experience with any of the others is similar to mine with Virgin, or if you would positively recommend someone.