The half-million investors who put money into Eircom's stock market flotation last July have seen one-third of their investment disappear as Eircom's share price collapsed.
But two Eircom executives, the chief executive, Mr Alfie Kane, and the finance director, Mr Malcolm Fallen, still received £1.7 million in total remuneration, including bonuses, last year.
Mr Kane also received more than £750,000 in bonuses and other payments due to him for the two years between March 1998 and March 2000. This includes a period when Eircom was a semi-State company.
Details of the payments to Mr Kane and Mr Fallen, and continued criticism of some aspects of their share option scheme, are likely to result in a stormy Eircom annual general meeting on September 13th. Shareholders will undoubtedly contrast their own financial misfortune over the past year with the size of the remuneration packages.
Mr Kane's exact package has not been broken down in the Eircom annual report published yesterday, but it is already public knowledge that he has a basic salary of £300,000 a year.
It is understood, however, that Mr Kane received about two-thirds of the £957,564 performance-related bonuses in the year to March 2000, with Mr Fallen, whose basic salary is £250,000 a year, receiving the balance.
The two men also shared "taxable benefits", a company car, medical insurance and accommodation payments worth a combined £113,380, while contributions of almost £135,000 were paid into their pension scheme.
A representative of Eircom said: "The payments are in line with normal public company payments, and some of the payments are in respect of the run-up to the IPO."
When Eircom formed its strategic alliance with KPN and Telia in 1996, Eircom was worth £1 billion, he continued. That value had risen to £7 billion by the time of the July 1999 flotation.
He added that the £957,000 performance-related figure shared between Mr Kane and Mr Fallen includes a long-term incentive payment for Mr Kane covering the two years to March 2000, as well as his IPO bonus. Both of these payments are nonrecurring, and the spokesman said that about 90 per cent of these additional payments will be absent from next year's accounts.
The package for Mr Kane and Mr Fallen was approved by Eircom's remuneration committee which consists of the chairman, Mr Ray MacSharry, the former Labour Party leader, Mr Dick Spring TD, and Mr Jim Flavin and Mr Martin Peters of KPN, a 21 per cent shareholder in the company.
Eircom's generosity to its executive directors is matched by payments to the 10 non-executive directors, who received an average of £36,000 each during the year. This is very much at the upper end of the scale of payments to non-executive directors by Irish public companies.
Of the £365,000 paid to the non-executive directors, it is understood that Mr MacSharry received £110,000.
Four non-executive directors - Mr MacSharry, Mr Flavin, Mr Spring and the former Bank of Ireland chief executive, Mr Pat Molloy, are also understood to have received the bulk of an additional once-off £136,000 for work on the flotation.