Mike Lynch’s Darktrace announced it was to be taken over by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
Meanwhile over the last couple of months the pharma company E-therapeutics said it would quit, with its chief executive Ali Mortazavi complaining the market was “completely broken”, while the likes CRH, Reguson and Tui have all departed.
The listing in London of the Greek industrials conglomerate Mytilineos, a rare move in the other direction announced last week, with all due respect to the company, hardly makes up for all those losses.
And yet it turns out that there could be a solution so simple that it is surprising that no one thought of it earlier. We just have to pay the executives in charge of major listed companies a whole lot more.
Over the last few weeks, there has been a row between shareholders and management over the £18.7m remuneration package awarded to the AstraZeneca boss Sir Pascal Soriot, admittedly one of the more deserving FTSE 100 leaders given the track record of the company under his stewardship.
Likewise, the London Stock Exchange Group has awarded a package worth as much as £13m to its chief executive David Schwimmer. In both cases, executives are arguing that they would be paid far more if the company was listed elsewhere.
“When you look at standards for compensation around the world, the US is in a different place,” argued Schwimmer justifying his package.
“And that is an issue companies competing on a global basis from a base in London need to take into account.”
The message is clear. Pay us at American levels, or we will shift our listing to New York, where no one will mind at all how much we take home. And London pay levels will have to be competitive to keep companies here.
In fairness, it is a clever tactic. The London market is in such a febrile state right now that almost anything that will keep a company listed in the UK will be waved through by shareholders worried that very soon they won’t have any London quoted stocks left to invest in (and if that happens who will need a British fund manager?).
And there is no question that some radical changes will be needed if the London stock market is to survive in any recognisable form. The trouble is, there are two big flaws in the argument that higher pay for chief executives is all we need to fix the crisis.
First, it is a myth that British chief executives are poorly paid globally. Sure, pay packages in the US can be extravagant, but across most of Europe they are far more modest.
A 2019 study by Pablo de Andrés of the University of Madrid found that UK chief executives on average were paid 95pc more than their counterparts in continental Europe, while a survey from Lensa found that British bosses were paid more in absolute terms than in rivals such as France, Germany and Italy, and also as multiple of the average salary within their company.
