With a number of UK biotechs struggling to find cash to stay afloat, investors are raising some sharp questions about the pay packages that executives in the industry earn. A recent survey by Nature Biotechnology concluded that the average CEO in the UK earned close to half a million dollars in annual compensation, modest compared to many U.S. salaries.
But that figure doesn't sit well with many of the investors being asked to bail out shaky developers. The pay doesn't live up to actual performance, critics say.
"There are quite a number of companies paying really quite substantial sums to CEOs and board members when they have very poor prospects. It cannot be helpful for the companies to have people draining cash out of them in this way," William Bains, associate faculty member at the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Cambridge, tells the Wall Street Journal.
"We can't allow the industry to just disappear, and then say that part of the problem was executive pay," Robin Davison, an analyst at Edison Investment Research in London, says.
- read the report [1] in the Wall Street Journal
Related Article:
CEO pay: Who makes what in Big Biotech? [2]
Links:
[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640028418875997.html
[2] http://www.fiercebiotech.com/special-reports/ceo-pay-2008-who-makes-what-big-biotech