THE chief executive of Johnston Press has been awarded a bonus of nearly £250,000, writes Scott Wright.
One-third of the bonus awarded to Ashleigh Highfield has been deferred for three years, with the newspaper publisher citing its “current lack of distributable reserves”.
And the remaining two-thirds will be deferred until the remuneration committee is “satisfied that a sound financial basis for the company had been achieved”.
Johnston Press publishes titles such as The Scotsman and Yorkshire Post. According to its annual report for 2017, Mr Highfield received a total pay package of £808,000 for 2017. That incldued a basic salary of £430,000 and pension contributions worth £115,000 – both of which were in line with his pay in 2016. He did not receive a bonus in 2016. The remuneration rise came in year which saw Johnston Press see a pick-up in regional print advertising and annual losses fall. The Edinburgh-based group lost £95 million before tax in 2017, compared with £300.7m in the preceding period.
Mr Highfield said at the time: “Whilst operationally the business is performing well in challenging markets, addressing the group’s capital structure remains a key priority.” Johnston Press had £195.9m adjusted net debt at the year-end, compared with £204.5m at the end of the preceding period.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here