By Andrew Warshaw
September 1 – He described his original $2 million pay offer as “insulting” yet now he is getting even less. Or is he? After six months in charge, and having failed to sign a contract that had been on the table since March, Gianni Infantino has now apparently agreed an annual salary of 1.5 million Swiss francs.
But the devil of the FIFA president’s pay package, triumphantly approved and made public by FIFA’s reconstituted compensation panel, is very much in the detail.
FIFA said Infantino will receive a chauffeured car, housing allowance plus monthly expenses of CHF2,000. That takes the total remuneration package closer to the original $2 million he was previously offered even though his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, had risen to earn far more.
Most intriguingly of all, Infantino will be eligible for an unspecified bonus in 2017 which potentially opens something of a can of worms given the sensitive nature of FIFA’s much-scrutinised financial state, the ongoing corruption scandal and the belt-tightning reform process Infantino has been to keen to implement.
“Given the earlier misunderstandings and misrepresentations concerning this process and my compensation, I am pleased that this matter is now resolved and that I have a signed, valid employment contract,” Infantino said.
The new deal, backdated to February, ends a dispute that saw former FIFA audit and compliance panel chairman and previous compensation committee chief Domenico Scala resign in protest. Infantino had described as ”insulting” Scala’s offer of around 2 million Swiss francs. The fact that the new package is virtually the same as the old “insulting” one suggests Infantino’s prime objective was always to get rid of Scala.
A FIFA statement said the new compensation sub-committee had determined the figures “by taking into account a number of factors, including two independent expert opinions prepared by external human resources consultants.”
Yet crucially, the promise of a bonus was not part of the original deal drawn up by Scala’s three-member panel – two of whom are no longer there – and perhaps goes some way to explaining why Infantino seems so happy to accept the new arrangement.
Then there is the question of the salary for Infantino’s new secretary-general Fatma Samoura. Scala’s committee were keen to throw more money at the position, viewed very much as a CEO-style job, than for the presidency itself. But it has now been announced that Samoura will earn less than Infantino at CHF1.3m-a-year with a car but not, apparently, accommodation.
On the thorny bonus issue, FIFA explained its rationale as follows: “The compensation sub-committee decided that bonuses would not be awarded for 2016 because the members, the president and the secretary-general believe that FIFA’s current compensation policy is inadequate and open to malfunction and misuse.
“Bonus payments from 2017 onwards will be awarded in accordance with objective criteria related to FIFA’s mission and operations as well as the outcome of the organisational reforms that are currently being implemented.”
Committee chairman Tomaz Vesel, Scala’s successor, pointedly added: ”The compensation amounts in our view are absolutely appropriate considering the challenging duties of the President and the Secretary General.”
Yet exactly why it was deemed necessary for the new-look compensation body to re-examine the decisions made by its predecessor is still open to considerable conjecture and eyebrows seem sure to be raised over the as yet unspecified promise of a bonus in view of the massively excessive payments paid internally to Blatter, one-time secretary-general Jerome Valcke and finance director Markus Kattner, the last two of whom were sacked earlier this year.
Blatter and Valcke have also have been banned by FIFA’s ethics committee for financial wrongdoing and are under criminal investigation by Swiss federal prosecutors. It is important to note, however, that Vesel and his colleagues are planning “a comprehensive review” of FIFA’s entire compensation policy.
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