Here is the latest Business View column from James Penn .

Investors have been making their views felt on executive pay at annual meetings this spring.

We are only part of the way through the AGM season, but already a few scalps have been taken.

Big victories (or big defeats, depending on whether one is a CEO or not) have centred on Imperial Brands, BP, Reckitt Benkiser and WPP.

A few weeks ago Imperial Brands (formerly Imperial Tobacco) abandoned its efforts to increase the chief executive’s long term incentive plan (LTIP) to 450 per cent of salary from 350 per cent, and the maximum award under LTIP for other executive directors from 250 per cent to 350 per cent.

The company’s Remuneration Committee tried to justify this on the basis that peers at other tobacco companies are being paid more than at Imperial, and to bring its pay policies into line with them.

Shareholders disagreed with this, and presumably felt that with so few other tobacco companies left there was little danger of executives jumping ship and moving.

They may also have felt that, if executives are being overpaid at another company, it is not a justification for doing so at Imperial.

Imperial introduced a small increase in the performance hurdle, with a target of nine per cent EPS growth rather than eight per cent, but shareholders don’t seem to have found this sufficiently stretching.

They also no doubt considered Imperial was likely to easily achieve the cash conversion target given the nature of the company.

There was a similar story at BP, where shareholder pressure saw CEO Bob Dudley’s LTIP maximum award reduced from seven times annual salary to five times, and his maximum pay award dropping from $19m to $15m.

Once again, the Remuneration Committee cut the award after pressure from shareholders.

There was history here. The previous year, Dudley had received $20m in total compensation, with 60 per cent of shareholders voting against the Remuneration Report.

Shareholder pressure at Reckitt Benkiser saw CEO Ranish Kapoor’s overall pay cut by a third from £23m in 2015. The company backed down on paying him a bonus after one of the company’s products caused several deaths in Korea.

The Board also agreed to take the recent Mead Johnson acquisition out of the calculation of EPS growth for the CEO’s LTIP plan (if a company is running out of growth, it is often easier to boost EPS through acquisitions).

Shareholder pressure also seems to have finally bitten at WPP. This column has commented on Sir Martin Sorrell’s pay before, but it is worth reminding ourselves of the amounts: £11.5m in 2010, £12m in 2011, £17.5m in 1212, £30m in 2013, £42.7m in 2014, £70.4m in 2015 and £48.1m in 2016.

Last year was the final year of the LEAP incentive scheme, which was responsible for most of the above.

A new pay policy is to be voted at this year’s AGM in June, which will mean that Sir Martin will be restricted to a £15m maximum payment in future.

Executive pay continues to be an issue, and the High Pay Centre calculates that senior executive pay has risen to 129 times that of the average worker.

Shareholder intervention is important as it reduces the likelihood or necessity of government intervention.

Some shareholders are not satisfied with current arrangements, and believe the Remuneration Policy (which is binding on companies) does not give a clear enough indication of what actual CEO pay is likely to be, particularly if share prices perform well.

The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, for instance, is campaigning for the introduction of a binding upper threshold for total annual pay.

The Labour Party’s manifesto recently pledged a maximum CEO salary of 20 times average worker pay for any company bidding for public contracts.

This may begin to seem attractive if executive pay is not further restrained.

The opinions stated are those of the author and should not be taken as investment advice. Any recommendations may not sbe suitable for all, so please contact your financial adviser for further guidance. The value of investments can go down as well as up.