Slated pension chief gets pounds 477,000 pay-off

COLETTE BOWE, the former head of the personal investors' watchdog, received a pay and compensation package worth nearly half a million pounds - despite being attacked by MPs for slow progress in clearing up the pounds 15bn pension mis-selling scandal.

The total compensation package for 1998 for Ms Bowe, who was chief executive of the Personal Investment Authority, was pounds 477,301 - more than the salaries of all the serving members of PIA's board put together and over twice as much as she earned the previous year.

She is now working for an undisclosed salary at Flemings, a British investment house which includes businesses she used to regulate.

Company accounts published yesterday confirmed Ms Bowe was made redundant, allowing her to claim compensation as well as the year's extra salary she was entitled to claim under her contract.

Despite announcing her resignation last September, Ms Bowe was deemed to have been made redundant because the scope of the job had changed since she was appointed, allowing her pounds 281,192 in redundancy pay and compensation.

She was also paid pounds 144,381 in salary and costs, pounds 21,000 in pension contributions and pounds 1,250 in private medical costs. Despite heavy criticism of the PIA's performance last year, she received a bonus for the year of pounds 30,000.

Senior industry figures yesterday branded the payoff a "disgrace". Geoffrey Pointon, a former regulator and founder of Pointon York, the independent financial advice firm, said: "This is totally and utterly outrageous - but of course, what can you do?"

The package follows a four-year career at the PIA in which Ms Bowe was repeatedly grilled by the Treasury select committee over alleged shortcomings by the regulator.

At the beginning of 1997 she was attacked by select committee MPs over the pension mis-selling scandal. Ms Bowe was in charge of the regulator from early 1994, when the pension mis-selling issue first blew up. The MPs slated the PIA for failing to clear up more than a tiny proportion of more than 1.5 million pension mis-selling cases in the three years since the review began.

Ms Bowe, a 51-year-old Liverpudlian, has had a colourful past. After attending a Catholic girls' school she studied economics at London University, where she supplemented her grant by posing for life classes at an art school. She gained a PhD in economics and joined the Department of Trade and Industry as an adviser, rising to become a director of information.

She is widely believed to have played a key role in the Westland affair of 1986, leaking a letter from the solicitor general which was critical of Michael Heseltine's role in the row over helicopter contracts.

While some believe she was given a nod by Downing Street, Bernard Ingham, former press officer to Mrs Thatcher, has indicated otherwise. However, she was cleared of wrongdoing by a Parliamentary inquiry.