Bart Becht, Reckitt Benckiser CEO, Starts Selling Up His Shares As Part Of Global Employee Loyalty-Enforcement Scheme
Last week VW chiefs cashed their share chips in at just the right time, netting €25m between them and presumably having a nice sunny Christmas/rest-of-life sabbatical somewhere; today the FT reports that Bart Becht, CEO of cleaning products behemoth Reckitt Benckiser and owner of piercingly blue eyes (left),has been steadily cashing in his shares to generate a seasonal glow around his bank balance.
Back in September Becht sold off the first bunch of his Reckitt shares at a price of £28.60, which made him£1.4m, then saw them rise only a wee bit more before they fell big time in October, reaching a low of £23.14. Now they’ve bounced back up again, and Becht clearly feels the time is right to sell more off, raising £2.85m from the sale of 100,000 shares. He’s still got 1.2m left, which a quick calculation at yesterday’s price says are worth £33,360,000. And he gets £22m a year as salary. Sigh.
Maybe this is all to free up shares as part of his effort announced last week to allow employees to buy shares in the company, “to focus the efforts of staff in 42 countries behind the company’s overall performance, rather then their own local business units”. Shares will be offered at 20% below their listed price for a short period, like an M&S pre-Christmas sale.
He’s especially targeting India’s emerging aspirational class, with MD CM Sethi saying: “We expect a very high take up rate of the share plan from employees in India”. Constant fear at fluctuating share prices may seem like an evil way to stimulate hard work, but surely it’s a more of a sound investment than pouring your money into the failing print media company you work for.
Reckitt has been enjoying 7% growth per year for seven years, against an industry growth of 3-4%. They spent £65m on advertising last year, helping us print media types out no end. What they actually do is make all sorts of things that end up at the back of cupboards, like Dettol, Lemsip, Finish and Cillit Bang, which gives us an excuse to tell you to go check this out, an oldie but a goodie…
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | December 9, 2008 2:54PM |