Westfield managers take pay cut, company's credit rating cut

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 9, 2020

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has announced pay cuts of between 20% and 25% for its senior executives with the unpaid salaries and fees being used to support efforts to fight the coronavirus in the countries in which the multinational property giant operates.

It said that “as a sign of solidarity with all employees, and with the full support of the Supervisory Board of URW, the Group CEO, Christophe Cuvillier, the Group CFO, Jaap Tonckens, and all members of the Group’s Senior Management Team have taken the initiative to reduce their remuneration by 25% for the period during which the partial activity measures will be in place”.

The members of its Supervisory Board are cutting their fees by the same percentage, and all the senior executives of the group’s US and European management committees have cut their fixed income by 20% during this period.

The company owns and run 90 shopping centres in 12 countries, including the two major Westfield shopping centres in London, one of which only recently completed an upgrade costing hundreds of millions of pounds.

It had last month said that it was in a strong cash position, but earlier this week, its credit rating was downgraded by rating agency Fitch on the back of the many problems affecting the retail sector and retail landlords in particular.

Fitch said the downgrade comes due to the company’s continuing high debt levels and expectations that the retail sector will see further weakness which will dent the landlord’s ability to reduce its debt and to raise its rents.