The chief controller of Deutsche Bank, Paul Achleitner, is again at the top of the ranking of the highest-paid supervisory board chairmen in the Dax, despite a partial waiver of remuneration in the pandemic year 2020.

Achleitner received a good 802,000 euros for his supervisory board mandate from Deutsche Bank - that was around 11 percent less than in the previous year, but was still enough for the top position that Achleitner has successfully defended for years.

Tillmann Neuscheler

Editor in business.

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As in the previous year, Deutsche Bank transferred a total of 6.1 million euros to its 20-person supervisory body.

No other DAX company spends so much money on its chief controllers.

BMW is having its supervisory body cost 5.6 million euros, Daimler just under 5.5 million euros.

This is the result of a remuneration study published on Tuesday by the German Protection Association for Securities Ownership (DSW).

However, if you also take into account the remuneration for supervisory board mandates at subsidiaries, VW supervisory board chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch is still ahead of Achleitner with total remuneration of 900,000 euros.

From this point of view, the former Daimler supervisory board chairman Manfred Bischoff would take third place with almost 742,000 euros, as he also received money for mandates at subsidiaries.

On average, the chairmen of the supervisory board in the Dax earned around 376,000 euros for their mandate last year.

That is 1.4 percent more than in the previous year.

The deputies in the DAX get an average remuneration of 240,000 euros, simple supervisory boards in DAX companies still to 112,000 euros.

The position of the chairman of the audit committee is becoming more and more important within the supervisory bodies.

This position was remunerated with an average of 217,000 euros.

These values ​​have changed little compared to the previous year.

According to the authors of the study, the pandemic has hardly affected the remuneration of Dax supervisory boards.

There is a simple reason for this: Almost all DAX companies have changed their remuneration for a long time.

In the meantime, it is common for members of the supervisory board - in contrast to the management board - to have pure fixed remuneration again.

Only three companies in the previous Dax 30 (the expansion of the leading index to 40 companies will not be taken into account in the study until next year) pay their supervisory boards variable remuneration in addition to the fixed salary: Deutsche Bank in the form of virtual shares, as well as Fresenius and Fresenius Medical Care.

The shareholder advocates rate the trend towards fixed remuneration, which has persisted for years, extremely positively: Supervisory boards are particularly challenged in times of crisis, and their workload increases enormously in these times.