‘Prosus CEO Bob van Dijk again best paid chairman of the board in 2020’

Bob van Dijk, CEO of tech investor Prosus, was again the highest paid chairman of the board in the Netherlands last year with an income of almost 15 million euros. That writes De Volkskrant Saturday on the basis of research it conducts annually into the remuneration of top men and women of the largest companies and institutions.

On average, the board chairmen of the 115 organizations surveyed earned 2.03 million euros last year. Dennis Dijkstra, chairman of the board of flash trader Flow Traders, made the most progress. His salary in 2020 was almost 7.8 million euros, 1.022 percent more than a year earlier. Flash traders profit from turmoil in the financial markets. This was also the case during the corona crisis, when the stock markets had to deal with many fluctuations.

Despite the corona crisis, the remuneration for the board chairmen of 58 of the 115 organizations surveyed increased. At 55 companies and institutions the salary of the top executive decreased, at two organizations the salary remained the same. The pay gap between the chairman of the board and the other employees has narrowed somewhat, the newspaper concludes. Board presidents earned an average of 29 times as much as the average employee last year, compared to 34 times as much in 2019. The income calculation includes all costs a company incurs for the remuneration of a board chairman. This includes salary, but also welcome and departure bonuses.

204 times more

In 2020, Van Dijk earned about 204 times more than the average employee of Prosus, the spin-off of the South African investment fund Naspers. His pay was considerably lower than that of 2019, when Van Dijk earned 38.6 million euros by extra benefits that year. Rick Clemmer from chip producer NXP is in second place with a reward of almost 13.7 million euros, Nancy McKinstry from Wolters Kluwer publishers follows with a salary of 13 million euros. Clemmer earned 223 times the average NXP employee, McKinstry’s salary 128 times that of the average publisher employee.

Earlier this year, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) also concluded that the pay gap at the thousand largest companies in the Netherlands decreased slightly between 2019 and 2020. The five highest-earning top people per company earned 5.9 times as much as the average employee last year, according to CBS. In 2017 they earned 6.1 times as much.

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