Michael O’Leary sees pay deal reach €4.7m

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary saw his overall pay packet rise to almost €4.7 million as a new deal with the airline kicked in.

Under the agreement, which commenced in April last year, Mr O’Leary earns a base salary of €1.2 million for 2024. His bonus, which can be up to 50 per cent of his base salary and is dependent on performance targets, came to an additional €590,000 for the year

The carrier’s annual report shows a further €2.89 million was included with his package, a non-cash, technical accounting charge for a 10 million unvested share option granted under Mr O’Leary’s contract.

In 2019, Mr O’Leary agreed a deal with the airline that granted him approximately €100 million in share options if the stock price exceeded €21 for 28 consecutive days, or if the firm reported annual post-tax profits of €2.2 billion.

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The annual report shows profit after tax rose to €1.92 billion in the year ended March 31st, while net cash increased to €1.37 billion.

Total revenue for the 12 months was €13.4 billion, up from €10.8 billion in the prior year. Of that, Italy accounted for more than €2.8 billion, with Spain close behind at €2.4 billion and the UK in third at €2 billion. Irish revenue was €790 million for the year.

The airline has seen traffic recover from the pandemic shutdown, carrying 183.7 million people over the year. That fell short of the original targets of 185 million passengers the company had expected to carry, but the airline attributed this to delays in the delivery of new aircraft.

The company said it was still short about 20 aircraft for the peak summer period, which also led to the reduction in traffic targets for the coming year by about five million.

Ryanair also cited rising costs in the report, with the fuel bill increasing by €1.25 billion last year. It has now hedged 70 per cent of its fuel for the coming year.

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