Mirza Baig, an ESG leader at Aviva Investors, told Funds Europe that executive pay will come under greater scrutiny this year with reward for elite managers measured up against the impact of Covid-19 on their staff.

In an interview published in the March issue, Baig said that despite certain drawbacks for BT last year, such as problems with fibre optics, the telecom company gained support from Aviva Investors in part because of its decision during the pandemic to suspend redundancy plans, defer executive bonuses, and to increase key-worker pay.

Baig, who is global head of ESG corporate research and stewardship at Aviva Investors (and also chair of the IA’s stewardship committee), is explicit in that scrutiny of executive pay is a development within ESG’s social component that fund managers and institutional investors might embrace the topic of societal fairness through pay votes at AGMs.

Read the interview here: ESG and corporate governance interview: Weighing in on fairness

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