Bonus payments top of the agenda at Reckitt and Tesco

Reckitt Benckiser's (RB.) Rakesh Kapoor was paid £23m in 2015, which included more than £18m as part of his long-term incentive plan (LTIP). This is linked to various criteria, including growth in earnings per share. The company has made alterations to the LTIP in the past five years in a bid to make it, in its view, fair. These include stretching the performance criteria management must meet, introducing a maximum number of shares and options that may be awarded, and tweaking the LTIP in 2015 to exclude the gain made on its demerger of Indivior.

It's also worth noting that these awards are, in effect, income and so treated like such for tax purposes. This is the reason why Mr Kapoor sold 77,459 shares (equivalent to more than £5.1m) on the same day as his LTIP award - to offset the taxman's bill.

But this didn't concern the near-fifth (23.8 per cent) of shareholders who voted against the directors' remuneration report at the group's annual general meeting, though, so it'll be interesting to see if the board makes any further changes to the way in which its most senior staff are paid. The prospects seem bleak, though, given Reckitt already believes it has "the most demanding shareholding requirements in the market". Mr Kapoor must hold 600,000 shares (roughly 40 times his salary) within eight years of appointment, which the board says aligns him and his colleagues with shareholders.

The story is similar at supermarket chain Tesco (TSCO) - albeit the numbers are smaller. Chief executive Dave Lewis returned the grocer to profit, so a bonus is perhaps justified. Mr Lewis was paid £4.6m in 2015, with £1.25m of this marked as annual salary and the remaining £2.99m paid as a bonus. But he won't be pocketing this straight away. A chunky 75 per cent of the bonus will be deferred to shares - equivalent to £2.42m - after he volunteered to defer a quarter of his total bonus on top of the compulsory half as part of his incentivisation.