Avaron initiates Executive Pay and Gender Pay engagement
We launched a themed engagement on CEO excessive pay and gender pay gap subjects targeting all companies across Emerging Europe regional portfolios managed by us. On CEO excessive pay we screened our portfolios to establish the availability of data and engaged with companies that do not provide proper disclosure in individual remuneration of board members. Regarding gender pay gap we followed up on our last year’s effort re‐engaging with companies that still have not yet started to publish the data. Altogether we got in contact with 22 companies out of the 42 we hold in the Fund to discuss the possibility of improving their disclosure on these topics. 9 companies promptly provided necessary data 1:1 or indicated on their disclosure plans, while 13 engagements are still ongoing.
After the initiative we had data to calculate excessive pay indicator for 33 companies out of 42. The indicator is calculated by dividing the annual total compensation for the highest remunerated individual to the average annual total remuneration of all employees excluding the highest paid individual. For the companies we have data it ranged from 3.5 to 129.9 with the median of 21.1.
Regarding the gender pay gap we managed to gather data for 26 companies with pay difference ranging from ‐14% to 38% and a median of 9%. Just to remind, last year we managed to gather data for only 14 companies, so things are gradually improving.
