Swiss Pay Doesn’t Always Match Company Success, Ethos Says

Switzerland continues to see a disconnect between executive pay and company performance three years after voters passed some of the world’s strictest limits on compensation, according to a study by corporate governance group Ethos. While the so-called fat-cat initiative has helped to improve transparency, absolute amounts paid to top managers and the boards of companies in the Swiss Performance Index in 2015 were up 2 percent, according to Ethos’s annual study of Swiss firms. “Since last year, we can see a divergence between company performance and compensation,” Vincent Kaufmann, who heads Ethos, told reporters in Zurich. “More than 50 percent of SPI companies had declining operating margins yet paid more to their executives.”