Daily Mail: Part-time job at Shell is a nice little earner: “Ollila's salary gives him membership of a fast-growing club of part-time chiefs earning £500,000 a year. Shell has been looking for a new chief since last October when it began reshaping itself in the wake of a humiliating oil reserves scandal that cost chairman Sir Philip Watts his job.”: Friday, August 5, 2005
By Tom Stevenson
CITY FINANCE
Deputy City Editor Ruth Sunderland
Telephone 020 7938 6000
ROYAL Dutch Shell has appointed the outgoing chief executive of Finnish phone giant Nokia as its new non-executive chairman on a part-time salary of £500,000. Jorma Ollila will only be required to work two to three days a week in The Hague and stays on as part-time chairman of Nokia.
Ollila's salary gives him membership of a fast-growing club of part-time chiefs earning £500,000 a year. Others include Sir Christopher Gent at GlaxoSmithK-line, Niall FitzGerald at Reuters and BT's Sir Christopher Bland, who works three days a week.
Although most chairmen agree to work for as long as it takes, their non-executive positions are anything but full-time commitments. Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP earned £390,000 last year despite holding down a similar position at investment bank Goldman Sachs. Martin Broughton chairs British Airways for £250,000 a year, but is only required to work 100 days a year. He also chairs the British Horseracing Board.
The appointment is a break with tradition for the Anglo-Dutch oil giant. Not only is he an outside appointment but the Finn is the first chairman in the company's history from outside Britain or the Netherlands. He is due to take up his new post next June when interim chairman Aad Jacobs stands down.
Shell has been looking for a new chief since last October when it began reshaping itself in the wake of a humiliating oil reserves scandal that cost chairman Sir Philip Watts his job.
Ollila is a non-executive director of Ford. He has also worked at Citibank in Helsinki and London. He turned Nokia into the world's biggest mobile phone maker, although it has faced stiff competition recently from Motorola and Samsung. Sales soared to a peak of £22.2bn in 2002 and Nokia's share price has risen 100-fold during Ollila's years at the helm.
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