Ian Guider's Market Talk

Shareholders are finally starting to stand up to executive pay

Martin Sorrell wants £70 million Pic: Getty

Record profits, an industry-changing merger and a share price not far off an all-time high: it wasn’t a bad 2015 for Paddy Power. Yet shareholders in the now-combined Paddy Power Betfair delivered a slap to the board last week, with nearly one-third of them rejecting the company’s plans to award executives bonuses over the next couple of years.

The revolt is somewhat surprising, given the transformative year the company has had, and it ...