This is a story that will break your heart. Yeah, right!

Apparently, the CEOs of our top companies haven’t seen their pay spike skywards recently but what they still get will shock the average Australian. It will also shock those who have invested their money in companies that have failed, share price-wise.

For example, look at Victor Herrero of Lovisa whose total pay packet for a year (wages and other payments) was...wait for it...$39.55 million. Let’s look at his company’s share price to see if he did a good job.

Here’s one year showing where the share price fell 10%:

Lovisa (LOV)

However, Lovisa’s five-year story shows that Victor hasn’t been a complete plonker.

Yep, Lovisa’s share price has been up from $6.54 to $29.71, which was a 318% gain!

Then again, since August last year, the share price has fallen from $37.48 to $29.71 (or 20%), which would make a normal person ask: “How come?” when they see Victor’s take home pay.

Here's what these CEOs have pocketed over the past year:

While I know these bosses work hard and have helped build wealth for shareholders and super fund members, their pay would shock normal people. And the shock is justified.

However, Australia isn’t the leader in overpayments for company bosses. The AFR looked at the average payments to these CEOs compared to what an ordinary worker is paid. It shows other countries are ‘madder’ than us. “The average is now 55 times the earnings of an average worker, down from 71 times in 2014,” Patrick Durkin and Lucas Baird reported. “Chief executive pay in the United States reached 348 times that of the median workers; among those running companies in the FTSE 100 Index, it is 78 times the average pay in the United Kingdom.”

These revelations came from research commissioned by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ASCI). The grunt work was done by the governance advisory business called Ownership Matters.

Local pay packets have been contained, believe it or not, because of law changes 16 years ago. “Australian investors and boards have used the changes to termination payments laws in 2009 to drive down the cost of CEO departures,” Ed John of ASCI said. Since that time shareholders have to approve any termination payments exceeding a year of pay, which means shareholders can ‘get even’ with hopeless CEOs whose share price has had a shocker.

Under the two-strikes rule, boards face a spill if they suffer shareholder votes of more than 25% against executive pay proposals at two consecutive annual general meetings, but often the ‘rank and file’ shareholder is denied the get-even right by big fund managers, who hold lots of shares and who green light silly pay rises for top executives at public companies.

The AFR says the golden parachute exit payment for many CEOs has been reduced because of the law change but the numbers still show some ordinary performers still get overpaid. “The fall in termination payments for ASX 100 chief executives – from $33.52 million last year to $8.38 million – was also due to the number of payouts falling from 17 to six,” the AFR writers revealed. “Only one, a $2.07 million payment to former Fortescue chief executive Fiona Hick, was above $2 million this year.

“Still, it was rare for chief executives not to be paid their bonus. Among the 142 CEOs in the study eligible for a bonus, only five received no money. The median bonus was paid out at just under 66 per cent of the maximum.”

Great CEOs should be rewarded but some poor performers have been over-rewarded for decades. For example, Mineral Resources (MIN) managing director Chris Ellison’s was paid $1.6 million but the AFR reports that his take-home pay, calculated by ACSI, reached $14.75 million. Chris is a major shareholder and had a shocker personally and company-wise. Look at what happened to the share price.

Mineral Resources

The share price was great until May last year. It has fallen 63% but Chris still gets over $14 million! Those shareholders who backed Chris and his past performance would be pretty MAD at what he takes home, and they’d be justified in being so.

As my dear grandmother used to jokingly say: “Them that’s got, git!”