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Timely boost for Boohoo’s Irish boss

John Lyttle awarded 1.9m share options as Ashley increases stake

John Lyttle now has 188,172 ordinary shares in the company (worth just under £64,000) and 5,431,081 options (equivalent to about £1.8m). Photograph: Dara MacDónaill

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Thu May 23 2024 - 06:00

It’s been a tough few years for John Lyttle, the Offaly-born chief executive of fast-fashion company Boohoo.

The company has endured falling revenues and profits, repeated criticism over the alleged use of forced labour by companies in its supply chain, and shareholder criticism over its generous pay package for senior executives, including Lyttle himself.

Just last week, however, Lyttle got another boost with 1.9 million share options awarded to him under the company’s deferred bonus plan — equivalent to nearly £660,000 (€775,405) at the company’s current share price of around 34 pence.

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Lyttle now has 188,172 ordinary shares in the company (worth just under £64,000) and 5,431,081 options (equivalent to about £1.8 million).

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He will, of course, want to get the value of those shares up, both for the other shareholders in Boohoo and for himself, and he has until May 17th, 2025 — when the options vest — to do so.

He may be forgiven for looking fondly at the share price in his first year as chief executive when it hit highs of more than £4, so he’s got a lot of work to do.

Someone who will also be looking at the share price is Mike Ashley, effectively the king of the high street these days. Through his Frasers Group, the umbrella company that controls the House of Fraser department store and his Sports Direct chain of stores, Ashley has been steadily building up his stake in Boohoo, which he views as complementary to his businesses.

Earlier this month, Frasers Group told the market that it had completed yet another acquisition of Boohoo shares, bringing its stake from just over 22 per cent to 23.1 per cent. It’s now sitting on more than 293 million shares in the company, which are worth just about £100 million.

Things aren’t about to get any less interesting for John Lyttle in the near future.

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