Companies that want to pay excessively high salaries or bonuses to their top executives will face strong opposition from foreign shareholders this year, according to Thursday’s Financieele Dagblad.

The paper says that the leading advisor of foreign investors, Brussels-based ISS, is to look more critically at salary policy before making voting recommendations to its clients.
‘We are going to be stricter with the performance norms in pay packages. Recently we saw a number of examples of ‘pay for failure’ and we want to avoid that,’ Kristof Ho Tiu, manager of the ISS office in Brussels, tells the paper.
This can have considerable consequences for Dutch listed companies, 75% of which are in the hands of foreign investors, the FD says..