The face of corporate Britain

The former chief executive of Telewest, Adam Singer, bid his final farewell yesterday to the sickly cable telephone company, which he headed until last summer. During his tenure, Telewest's shares plummeted from £5.63 to just 2.1p and, since the start of 2002, the company has laid off 1,500 staff.

Mr Singer's reward for overseeing the company's decline to the point where it is struggling to ward off bankruptcy? A colossal £1.8m in 2002, according to the company's annual report, published yesterday. The report showed the package was £1.4m in compensation for loss of office, calculated on the basis of two years' of his £600,000 annual salary, plus other unspecified benefits.

Sir Brian Moffat also announced his departure yesterday from Corus, the steel maker he has chaired for the past four years. Sir Brian is not in line for a pay-off. But shareholders nonetheless felt that his £245,000 salary last year and rumoured pension contributions of £300,000 looked out of place after the company had sacked more than 10,000 employees, frozen the salaries of many others and racked up £2bn of losses since it was formed out of the former British Steel in 1999.

The oil giant Shell and the fund manager Schroders were also the object of shareholders' fury when both boards had angry clashes with investors at annual meetings yesterday. Similar showdowns will follow in the next few weeks after new legislation gave shareholders the right to vote on directors' remuneration for the first time.

In the past 12 months, Shell's shares have slumped by 27 per cent and it plans to lay off 4,000 staff, including 650 in the UK, while Schroders' shares have lost 26 per cent of their value. Yet both companies pressed ahead with generous pay packages for their chief executives.

Schroders had to explain a total payout of £2.9m for Michael Dobson, the head of the famous City institution. Shell was left justifying a 55 per cent pay rise for its chairman, Sir Philip Watts, to £1.79m. He also received £1.167m for his pension.

The Rolls Royce annual report also revealed yesterday that Sir John Rose, its chief executive, has seen his pay packet grow by 16.5 per cent to £1.1m in 2002 ­ a year that saw the aircraft engine manufacturer fall out of the FTSE 100 index of blue chip stocks as its profits nearly halved and its shares slumped 70 per cent.

Hefty retirement benefits as well as salary hikes have formed part of this year's pay round for company executives, despite the fact that one in three companies has closed the doors to generous final-salary pension schemes for their workers, viewing them as too expensive to run.

As anyone who owns shares or pays into a pension will know, times have been tough for businesses for the past three years. Equities have plummeted, companies have under-performed and employees have been laid off in their droves. Yet details of last year's pay packages for Britain's executives, which have been published in recent weeks, show that despite the 36-month downturn, the fat cats have still been quietly sipping their cream.

Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of the union Amicus, whose members staged a protest outside Shell's AGM, said: "It seems that during the bad times boards do just as well as the good times. We don't mind when people receive large amounts when it is reasonable."

The telephone-number salaries that executives are paid kicked off in earnest in the UK when publicly owned utilities went private in the 1980s and 1990s. Cedric Brown, chief executive of British Gas, led the charge with a 75 per cent pay rise for himself in 1995. He was greeted at the company's AGM by a 30-stone pig, also called Cedric, brought by some shareholders unhappy with Mr Brown's apparent desire to feed at the "trough of privatisation".

However, executive pay has exploded into a full-scale war this year after the Companies Act was amended last year to force all entities listed on the UK stock market to put pay packets for directors up for a vote at AGMs. The downward slide of shares means the change could not have come at a worse time.

The outcome of the vote on the remuneration report is not binding. But early evidence is showing that the votes are sending a clear signal to management about the satisfaction, or lack of it, they enjoy.

Reuters, Granada and Reed Elsevier are just three companies that know from bruising encounters over the past few weeks that it is not easy to defenddirectors' pay rises. More than 20 per cent of shareholders have used their new-found vote to object.

Plenty more companies will have to walk over hot coals in the coming days. Today, Matt Barrett, chief executive of Barclays bank, will try to justify his package, which includes a "golden goodbye" of £5m, twice his annual salary, if he loses his job.