Reuters shares recovery opens door to pay bonanza for Glocer

Tom Glocer, the chief executive of Reuters, was paid £2m in cash and up to £10.6m in performance-related share awards last year following a strong recovery in the company's share price and a return to profit at the information and technology group.

Mr Glocer will hope the early successes of the company's turnaround plan will mean he avoids similar scenes to those at last year's annual meeting when he was barracked for a £612,000 bonus for 2002, even though the company's share price had slumped 70 per cent.

He subsequently said bonuses should not necessarily be related to share price movements.

However, it seems likely the company will point to last year's sharp recovery in the Reuters share price to justify not only Mr Glocer's £801,000 bonus for 2003 but also an award of 1.7m shares worth £6.6m at last night's closing price. Mr Glocer, however, can only sell these shares in 2008 and the award could be reduced unless certain performance targets are met.

Mr Glocer also received three other awards under option schemes of a further 2 million shares at exercise prices ranging from 90p-245p, which are exercisable from February 2006 and subject to the chief executive meeting performance targets. At yesterday's closing price these packages were worth £4.1m.

The Reuters annual report, published yesterday, also revealed Mr Glocer received a basic salary of £816,000, plus his near 100 per cent bonus, plus £281,000 in benefits including rent for his home of £240,000, bringing the grand total for his remuneration to £12.6m.

The company's turnaround plan envisages about 3,000 jobs being lost across its information equipment business and its famous editorial operation.

Reuters ran into trouble in 2001 when its investment banking clients instigated savage spending cuts as the global economy slowed. The company also saw its share price hit by the general sell-off in media and technology stocks, falling from a high of £16.20 in 2000 to a low in 2003 of just 95.5p.

Sir Christopher Hogg, the company's chairman, will retire this year with a pension fund worth £1.88m. He is to be replaced by Niall FitzGerald, the outgoing chairman of Unilever.

At its full year results in February, Mr Glocer said Reuters' revenues in 2003 fell 10.2 per cent while there was only an outside chance they would start to grow by 2005. However, he said the declines in sales were beginning to slow, contributing to pre-tax profits of £49m against a loss of £493m in 2002.