Ex-Army helicopter pilot Peter Dilnot tops ‘Fat Cat’ City league after landing £45million pay package

The boss of Britain’s biggest company has been knocked off his perch as the FTSE 100’s highest-paid chief executive, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Pascal Soriot, who runs drugs giant AstraZeneca, has slipped to third place in our annual survey of boardroom pay, known as the Fat Cat Files.

He has been replaced at the top by the relatively unknown Peter Dilnot, who along with his predecessor Simon Peckham shared more than £100 million at engineer Melrose last year.

Sandhurst-educated Mr Dilnot, 55, who is a former army helicopter pilot, landed a £45million pay package.

Mr Dilnot runs Melrose, an aerospace engineering business that specialises in reviving industrial firms.

He and three other executives took home a combined £208million under a share scheme agreed five years ago after they hit their performance targets. It was one the largest payouts in British corporate history and also saw Mr Dilnot scoop a one‑off £43million bonus.

However, almost two-thirds of Melrose shareholders opposed the awards, claiming they were excessive.

Our survey also found that:

• The total paid to FTSE 100 bosses has surpassed £500 million for the first time;
• Top executives netted an average of £5.5 million each last year, up 11 per cent on the previous year, as their earnings grew at more than twice the rate of the national average; 
• Melrose overtook Tesco as the firm with the largest pay gap between its boss and a typical worker.

Soriot was the highest paid FTSE 100 boss last year after AstraZeneca shares soared following the successful roll-out of its Covid vaccine and revival of its drugs pipeline and portfolio.

Moving up: Pascal Soriot has been replaced at the top of the Fat Cat Files by the relatively unknown Peter Dilnot (pictured)

But his pay – a big chunk of which is linked to share price growth – fell to £14.7 million from £16.9 million in 2024 after the company’s stock market rally stalled. It meant he was also leapfrogged in the big pay league by the new boss of education publisher Pearson.

Omar Abbosh was handed £16.3 million last year – the bulk of which involved buying out the executive from his contract with Microsoft. However, not all bosses shared in the bonanza. Rolls-Royce’s Tufan Erginbilgic took a pay cut of almost £10 million, despite the engineer’s stellar share price performance.

He took home £4.1million, down from £13.6 million the previous year, due to the absence of a one-off £7.5 million payment he received for lost earnings at his previous job with BP.

Emma Walmsley again was the highest-paid female boss, though her pay at Glaxo SmithKline dipped from £12.7 million to £10.6 million. But she could land up to £22 million this year with the drugs maker under a US-style pay packet.

The huge payouts at Melrose, owner of the GKN aerospace business, means it replaced supermarket chain Tesco as the FTSE 100 firm with the largest pay gap between its chief executive and a typical worker.

Its accounts show that chief executives Dilnot and Peckham were paid 1,112 times more than the £53,000 received by the average Melrose employee. It means the duo earned more in a few hours than the rest of the workforce were paid all year.

Dilnot took home more than £45million and Peckham, who stood down as boss in March 2024, netted almost £58 million under a controversial ‘long-term incentive’ bonus scheme.

Two other directors, Christopher Miller and Geoffrey Martin, received £50 million and £57 million respectively under the same plan in one of the biggest payouts in UK corporate history. Only Dilnot, a Sandhurst-educated former army helicopter pilot, is still at Melrose.

The aerospace group’s fortunes have been transformed by a series of deals, including the purchase of defence giant GKN in 2018. The company is now worth £7.5 billion, having more than doubled in value since the executive bonus scheme was agreed more than four years ago. A demerger of GKN’s automotive arm into another stock market firm, Dowlais, gave the share price a further boost.

The Melrose pay vote, which was advisory rather than binding, was one of the biggest shows of investor frustration in recent years. The scale of the rebellion recalled the row over a £75 million package paid to Jeff Fairburn at Persimmon in 2018.

Fairburn was ousted from the builder just four months after landing his bonus, which share owners slammed as ‘grossly excessive’ and voted down.

But for some in the City these pay packages are not too high, but rather too low.

AstraZeneca, which is valued at almost £175 billion, is one of a number of blue chip firms that may shift their main stock market listing to New York – in part because of concerns that boardroom pay is lower in London.