Manager bonuses are often a subject of dispute, and Deutsche Lufthansa now has a conflict over bonus payments to the board of directors around chairman Carsten Spohr.

At a meeting in early December, the Supervisory Board decided to reactivate a long-term incentive program that had been suspended during the pandemic.

This also enables payments for previous years that went well.

This was confirmed by a company spokesman on Wednesday, previously the "Handelsblatt" had reported on it.

Timo Kotowski

Editor in Business.

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Spicy about the decision: Distributions can only be made in 2025, but the years from 2021 onwards are used to calculate the long-term bonus.

At that time, Lufthansa was still claiming state aid from the Corona rescue package, the federal government only withdrew completely from the group in September of this year.

And for the duration of the support, bonuses were excluded.

Group sees no violation of the law

Employee representatives in particular are said to have raised concerns in the supervisory board that the decision could violate the agreement on the Corona aid package.

So there was no unanimous decision.

However, the majority in the court apparently saw themselves confirmed by a legal opinion obtained that there was no violation.

In fact, the framework agreement between the federal government and Lufthansa provides for the omission of bonuses “as long as the company makes use of the stabilization measures.” At the time of the Supervisory Board decision at the beginning of the month, this was no longer the case, and it is certainly not the case with the possible payment in 2025.

A spokesman said that from the group's perspective, "all decisions are in accordance with the law".

Executive Board remuneration down by two-thirds

In addition to legal questions, critics may have come across how the bonus project was justified.

It should have been pointed out that board members had particularly large losses in the pandemic.

CEO Spohr received the same basic remuneration of 1.6 million euros in 2021 as in 2019. The variable remuneration, which amounted to 3.3 million euros in 2019, was completely eliminated.

As a result, his total remuneration fell by two-thirds.

The slump in air traffic in the corona pandemic had plunged Lufthansa and the entire industry into a serious crisis.

The group reported an adjusted operating loss of 7.8 billion euros for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021.

This year business is going better again, tickets can be sold at higher prices.

Lufthansa recently raised its forecast for the year again, for this year positive earnings before interest and taxes of 1.5 billion euros are expected.

The state aid, the group had been granted a rescue package worth a total of 9 billion euros with loans and silent participations from the federal government, was repaid faster than many expected.

After the group had cut more than 30,000 jobs, Lufthansa plans to hire 20,000 new employees by 2023.

However, the start-up of operations this year annoyed customers, as staff shortages led to cancellations and delays - increasingly again in the past few days.