Aer Lingus’s recent industrial relations tussle with its pilots, which led to weeks of disrupted and cancelled flights and disgruntled passengers during the peak summer holiday travel months, cost the company an estimated €55 million.
In a statement this month, it said it was still “assessing the implications of the financial damage caused by the dispute in the context of the current competitive environment and the passenger cap at Dublin Airport”.
However, it does not appear to have unduly affected the company’s assessment of the performance of Aer Lingus’s chief executive Lynne Embleton, who last week got another tranche of shares under the airline’s parent company’s performance share plan.
According to a recent stock exchange filing, Embleton was granted 152,037 nil-cost shares which would be worth just over £267,000 (€315,358) at IAG’s current share price.
That comes just a few weeks after Embleton got a separate award of 149,271 shares, worth just over £245,000.
Embleton wasn’t the only Irish IAG executive to be granted a healthy chunk of shares. Corkman Sean Doyle, chief executive of British Airways, was granted 52,800 shares in the recent round of awards.
It’s not clear just how much Embleton is paid overall – because she’s not a board member they’re not obliged to break out her remuneration and its breakdown – but accounts for Aer Lingus filed with the Companies Office show that the Irish carrier’s total pay for its local directors leapt from €1 million in 2021 to €2.7 million in 2022. That year also saw €1.3 million in “benefits under long-term incentive schemes”, though this was down from €2.3 million the year before. It’s quite likely that Embleton got a very large chunk of that.
Meanwhile, her potential rewards under the airline’s share bonus schemes are also pretty lucrative. In March of this year, for example, Embleton was put in line for 406,626 shares under the company’s restricted share plan, which vests in 2027. In March of last year she received 400,442 shares granted under the restricted share plan that vests in 2026. And in March of 2022, she was granted 397,338 shares under the restricted share plan that vests in 2025.
That’s just about £2 million at IAG’s current share price, but of course neither Embleton nor her fellow IAG holders are guaranteed to get all of those shares. As the IAG remuneration points out “[vesting is] dependent upon a satisfactory review of the discretionary underpin by the remuneration committee”, so a lot will depend on how they meet their targets in the coming years. They’ll be hoping there are no more major industrial relations disasters.
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