Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY) is proposing to slash its chief executive’s pay by £220,000 and spend £20m to raise retirement benefits for the rest of staff – only months after defending the boss’s bumper remuneration package. The bank is consulting shareholders over plans to cut António Horta-Osório’s pension package, which earlier this year was worth nearly half of his £1.3m base salary before being trimmed to 33%. That compared with 13% offered to the rest of staff. The proposals would mean the banks’s contribution to the chief executive’s pension being cut further, to 15% of salary from July 2020. Retirement benefits for the group’s 65,000 workforce would be raised to the same level, costing roughly £20m a year.
A backlash against vaping in US has dented revenue growth at the cigarette-maker British American Tobacco (BATS). BAT said revenues in its “new category” arm – which includes vaping – would grow at the lower end of its previously announced range of 30% to 50% for the 2019 financial year. The overall US vaping market has declined by about a quarter, according to Tadeu Marroco, BAT’s finance director, since the health concerns emerged centred on sometimes fatal lung injuries. Those concerns, as well as others about underage vaping, were enough to catch the attention of Donald Trump.
