The Zacchaeus Principle

There is widespread public concern about the high remuneration of Directors of major listed companies.  I think we should encourage people to adopt a Zacchaeus Principle. People who receive more than £1M pa should be encouraged to donate 50% of their earnings to charities of their choice.

There is strong scientific evidence that giving away extra money makes you happier than keeping it for yourself.  So why not require Annual Reports to disclose who has signed up to (and is abiding by) this Zacchaeus Principle and that RemCos should link bonuses to whether the EDs are willing to follow this principle.

Lest we imagine that the high earnings are truly earned, we should reflect that remuneration of CEOs has gone from 47-88x the Median earnings in last 10 years, whilst the FTSE 100 index has gone down by about 1%.

PS (7 Dec) Maybe £1Mpa should be replaced by 20x Average earnings. This would be "only" £520k but there is at least a feel in the management literature that a gap of more than 20x from top to bottom in a firm is problematic.