TotalEnergies will offer to increase the salary of its CEO, Patrick Pouyanné, by 10%.

The board of directors of TotalEnergies indicated on Thursday 16 March that it will propose to the general meeting of shareholders on 26 May a 10% increase in the remuneration of its chief executive Patrick Pouyanné, criticized last year for his paychecks.

The board will file a motion providing that “remuneration and the award of performance shares for 2023 are proposed to increase by 10% compared to 2022,” according to a press release from the group on the convening of this general meeting. It deals with an “increase equivalent to that which the managers of the common social base in France have benefited on average”, specified the group.

The increase derives on the one hand from the 10% increase in remuneration, on the variable part – the fixed remuneration of 1.5 million euros does not change; and on the other hand the 10% increase in the number of performance shares, a source at TotalEnergies told AFP. The group’s executives benefit from an increase of 7.5% on salary and 15% on the variable part and on bonuses, or on average almost 10%, specifies the company. The budget for the number of performance shares assigned to non-executive executives also increased by 10%.

The Chief Executive Officer’s total compensation in 2022 has not yet been released. In 2021, Patrick Pouyanné’s remuneration had increased by 51.7%, to 5,944,129 euros, an amount at the center of a controversy in the autumn in the midst of a salary dispute in the group’s refineries. This increase followed a 36.4% drop in his pay in 2020, the result of a pay cut later billed as “voluntary” during the health crisis, and a drop in the variable portion of his salary that year linked to results from the group.

In 2019, the year before the pandemic, it amounted to 6.15 million euros. “It is not me who sets my compensation, but the Board of Directors of TotalEnergies who sets it and the shareholders who approve it – it is certainly high, but comparable to my peers in the CAC40 and much lower than that of the other European majors[ne]if american[e]s” of the petrochemical sector, he defended the CEO on Twitter.