Public transport champion Brian Souter does not drive a company car, nor does his finance director Martin Griffiths, according to the Stagecoach annual report which was published yesterday.

Public transport champion Brian Souter does not drive a company car, nor does his finance director Martin Griffiths, according to the Stagecoach annual report which was published yesterday.

The group did compensate chief executive Souter with an allowance in lieu of company car of £17,200 however, in a year in which the group's co-founder was paid £1m in salary and bonuses, banked £6.4m in notional gains from share options, received £5.7m in dividends on his holding of 105 million shares, and saw his pension transfer value tick up to £5.1m.

The board's remuneration committee also granted an £18,000 allowance in lieu of company car to Griffiths, whose total salary and bonuses jumped during the year from £575,000 to £821,000, and who made a gain of £386,179 on exercising share options.

The committee awarded Griffiths his maximum 50% of salary in bonus, while Souter had to settle for 47.5%.

Souter exercised options over 4.37 million shares during the year, 1.7 million of them awarded in December 2002 when Stagecoach was at 27p, but he has retained all the shares.

Griffiths made a further gain of £603,208 this week when he sold a batch of more than 250,000 option shares at this year's peak price of 298p (the shares dipped 12p to 276p yesterday).

Stagecoach placed orders for new buses worth £42.8m in 2008 (£45.6m in 2007) with Alexander Dennis, the Scottish bus manufacturer 38% owned by Souter and co-founder Ann Gloag and 28% by Noble Grossart, where Stagecoach non-executive Ewan Brown is a 22% shareholder.

Brown, 20 years on the board, along with chairman Robert Speirs, 13 years a director, are both put forward for re-election at the annual meeting as independent directors along with two other non-executives and Souter.

The report shows Stagecoach comfortably outrunning the all-share, FTSE-250 and transport indices over 12 months and five years.