Shell to curb pay, bonuses after investor revolt

The head of Shell's remuneration committee said salaries for Voser and Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry, which are 20 percent lower than their predecessors', were being frozen until 2011.

This year, directors will not award management bonuses if they fail to meet pre-agreed targets without "prior shareholder engagement."

Top management received bonuses for 2008 despite not hitting targets, prompting 60 percent of the Shell investors who voted to oppose the 2008 remuneration report.

Niels Lemmers, spokesman for the Dutch shareholder association VEB, said he would have liked Shell to have given investors the right to block discretionary payouts and for the threshold of performance at which a bonus was payable to have been lifted.

"We think it's very good that Shell has finally started a dialogue with shareholders but it's still too easy to get a bonus," Lemmers said.

Investors in European corporates, who traditionally vote overwhelmingly in favour of managements' plans, registered their dissatisfaction with companies' handling of and contribution to the global economic crisis in unprecedented numbers in 2009.

A third of voters at mining group Xstrata's annual general meeting opposed its pay policy, and more than a third of investors opposed oil major BP's executive pay plan.

A majority of investors in troubled bank Royal Bank of Scotland , housebuilder Bellway and Provident Financial also opposed pay plans in 2009, and last week, residential landlord Grainger lost a shareholder vote on executive pay.

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