Berkeley turns on charm over pay

A CHARM offensive by housebuilder Berkeley Homes' new non-executive director, Victoria Mitchell, has impressed institutional shareholders but is unlikely to head off a revolt over executive pay at today's annual meeting.

Mitchell, former executive director of property agents Savills, has chaired Berkeley's remuneration committee since June. She has seen many of the builder's large shareholders in the past two weeks to explain a controversial £1.2m payment to managing director Tony Pidgley.

A source at Morley Fund Management, which owns just over 3% of the £1.1bn housebuilder, said: 'If more non-execs acted as diligently and pro-actively as she had in the first place, we would not have had this problem. She is a rarity.'

The source said, however, that Morley would still be voting against Berkeley's pay policy. More than half of Berkeley's shares are held by six institutional shareholders and a further 14 account for almost all the rest.

Investors are furious that Berkeley's board decided to make the payment to Pidgley last year under an incentive plan from which he was excluded when it was set up three years ago. The payment took his total pay package to £4.7m last year.

Berkeley's board, chaired by Roger Lewis, apologised a week ago for its decision to backdate the payment, agreeing that it 'was clearly undesirable and not in accordance with best practice'. However, the company is not going to claw back Pidgley's payment.