Activist financier TCI Fund Management knocked Volkswagen AG for extreme executive pay due to bad stock performance and bloated expenses that harm profits even before the diesel-emissions scandal from last year that triggered the carmaker’s biggest-ever loss.
For over four years, “the shares and management have been constant disappointments,” TCI founder Chris Hohn wrote to Volkswagen. “With a brand-new management group in place, we want to reveal officially what we get out of the company and how management ought to be paid going forward.” A spokesman for Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen refused to comment.
TCI stated it supervises more than $10 billion in assets and has “economic exposure to more than 2 percent” of Volkswagen. Ben Walker, a partner at TCI, refused in a phone interview to define whether London-based TCI controls Volkswagen common stock, which brings ballot rights. About 89 percent of the voting stock is held by the Porsche and Piech owner families, the German state of Lower Saxony and the emirate of Qatar, which restricts the impact of external investors.
