At a meeting of the VW Supervisory Board, changes to the remuneration system for board members should have been posted on the wall, according to Handelsblatt. A group guard protested vehemently. VW rejects the report as false.
Bernd Althusmann
Monday, 26.03.2018
1:17 pm
The Supervisory Board of Volkswagen has apparently entered into a heated dispute over the remuneration system for members of the Management Board. The reports the “Handelsblatt” citing insiders.
At the meeting four weeks ago, Supervisory Board Chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch had therefore wanted to vote on readjustments to the model, which had already been decided on in outline terms in 2017. However, he did not inform the members of the panel in advance about the planned changes. At the meeting, the new system was thrown on the wall only by beamer, reports the newspaper. On it displeasure aroused.
Volkswagen denies that the scandal took place at all: “The Supervisory Board has this year with no reorganization and no changes to the system for compensation of the Executive Board and also the Annual General Meeting will not do so .. Other claims are simply wrong,” it said from the communications department.
According to the “Handelsblatt”, Bernd Althusmann, who had only just been appointed to the Supervisory Board, felt that he had been overrun by the way in which the issue was to be dealt with. Althusmann had finally declined to vote on the session on the new system, writes the
Althusmann is also Minister of Economics in Lower Saxony. He is next to Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD) one of two representatives of the major shareholder Lower Saxony in the VW Supervisory Board.
The adjustment of the remuneration of the Executive Board shall be finalized by the VW shareholders at the Annual General Meeting in May. Until then Althusmann wanted to catch up with the casting of his vote, it was said.
For Althusmann as well as for Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister Weil, the Executive Board remuneration at Volkswagen is a hot topic. In recent years, there has always been strong criticism of the amount of compensation. The former VW boss Martin Winterkorn had once received a record compensation of 17 million euros.
Neither Althusmann nor Volkswagen wanted to comment on the facts on request.
Weil criticized while statements by VW CEO Matthias Müller on the regulation of executive salaries. “Comparing a limit of manager salaries to five million euros per year with the conditions in the GDR is completely outlandish,” said Weil of the world”,
Müller had in SPIEGEL to the question of a salary cap of, for example, five million euros answered: “In Germany there is an urge to want to regulate everything politically, but where is this supposed to end? We already had something like this in the form of the GDR, where everything was settled.”
Weil said that with these statements Müller would “not even live up to the conditions in Germany at a distance”. In the GDR people had “certainly other problems than top salaries of managers” had.
The SPD politician also criticized Müller’s general reasoning for salaries of top executives. Müller’s argument, according to which a VW CEO ultimately also bears a very great responsibility, Weil could claim to occupy quite different occupational groups, which earned much less.
Mueller had mentioned in SPIEGEL two reasons for a high salary: The relevance of the company for the economy as well as the risk, which one carries as a group boss: “As such one stands always with one foot in the prison.”
Previously, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) had shown “astonished” about the salary growth of VW top managers. The remuneration of the members of the Executive Board rose to around EUR 50.3 million in 2017 – after EUR 39.5 million in the previous year.