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Jersey Electricity Managing Director Chris Ambler’s pay and bonus last year totalled an eye-watering £406,654 – more than US President Barack Obama and almost three times as much as UK Prime Minister David Cameron.
Besides being a good year for Mr Ambler, who joined the company eight years ago, last year was also a good one for the company, which returned a £7.3 million dividend to the States of Jersey, which owns a 62% share in the firm.
Mr Ambler’s total package included a basic salary of £207,901, a bonus of £74,884, a second bonus for the Normandie 3 project of £110,000 and benefits in kind worth £13,869.
On top of that, Mr Ambler has a pension pot worth £471,932, earned an additional £80,934 through non-executive directorships of Foresight Solar Fund Limited and Apax Global Alpha Limited, and has a £440,157 loan from the company set at the historically low Bank of England base rate.
The figures have been disclosed in the annual report for Jersey Electricity which defends Mr Ambler’s £184,884 bonuses, saying that they are not related to the profit that the company makes.
The report says: “The bonus payable to the Executive Directors is performance related and as highlighted last year we developed more clearly defined criteria and constructed bonuses around key project milestones for the Company. The criteria remain deliberately unrelated to profit.”
Last year Jersey Electricity imported 94% of the Island’s electricity from EDF in France, with 5% coming from the incinerator, and the remaining 1% generated in the Island.
The annual report also states that the reliability of the Island’s electricity supply – in terms of the amount of time that customers were without power – was around ten times better than the UK average, and that typical prices charged in Jersey are around 5% lower than the EU average.
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