Joyce left Qantas suddenly last September, bringing forward his retirement as the airline fought legal battles on several fronts and was suffering from a significant negative sentiment shift as a result.
This morning Qantas announced that Joyce’s renumeration for the 2023 financial year would be reduced by $9.26 million.
The largest part of this reduction is due to the airline’s board deciding that Joyce should not be given any of the shares that were held for him as part of his long term incentive plan, which had a collective value of $8.36 million, based on a $6.20 share price on June 30, 2023.
Joyce is also losing more of his short term incentive – 33 per cent, which is higher than the 20 per cent reduction applied across the Qantas executive team.
In publishing the reductions to what will be Joyce’s final payout, Qantas flagged the industrial relations case it lost – for the third time – in September 2023 and the case brought against it by the the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) last year, for continuing to sell flights that had already been cancelled and failing to notify passengers of cancellations in a timely fashion.
In May this year, Qantas agreed to a settlement with the ACCC of $120 million, which includes a customer remediation program. This is still awaiting Federal Court approval. The size of the penalty for the industrial relations case is still unknown.
The airline also released details of a governance review today, which paints an unfavourable picture of the airline under Joyce’s leadership, referring to top down leadership, there being a “‘command and control’ leadership style”, a focus on financial performance over stakeholders and the board not challenging its “dominant” leader enough.
The governance review makes a host of recommendations and Qantas has outlined its actions in response, some of which have already been completed.
