Beazley forced to lower chief exec’s pay following mistake in insurer’s results
Beazley was today forced to publish a correction to its balance sheet after the Financial Times spotted an embarrassing error in its annual report.
In its annual results statement, insurer Beazley overstated the value of its ‘net assets per share’ in reporting them at 420.8c instead of their real value 386.7c.
Beazley’s error is particularly significant due to the fact it uses the ‘net asset value per share’ metric as its “central performance indicator”.
The payouts given to Beazley’s top execs are in turn linked to their successes in boosting achieving growth in the ‘net asset value per share’ metric.
In a statement this morning, the FTSE 100 company admitted it had made an “error” in its report, as it issued a correction to figures.
The insurer also published corrections on the sums that would be paid out to its chief executive, Adrian Cox, and chief financial officer Sally Lake.
The revised statement saw Cox’s salary reduced by £138,464, to a total sum of £1.51m, and saw Lake’s remuneration dropped by £108,119, to £1.26m.
However, a Beazley spokesperson told City PM that no real money was actually clawed back from its top execs, as “this was simply an error and no monies had been paid out”.
Beazley currently runs six Lloyd’s of London syndicates in underwriting a broad book of business covering an array of areas including cyber, property and marine insurance.
The insurer’s annual results were audited by Big Four accounting firm EY, who refused to comment when approached by City PM