As of: 09/21/2021 3:55 p.m.
Michael Diekmann from Allianz and Paul Achleitner from Deutsche Bank are among the most powerful and best-paid supervisory boards in Germany. Women are still a small minority.
The majority of the chief supervisors of leading German companies are still male. According to the latest study by the German Association for the Protection of Securities Holdings (DSW), the proportion of women on the supervisory boards of the 30 DAX companies was slightly more than a third in 2020: exactly 36.5 percent. Compared to the previous year, this was a minimal decrease of 0.1 percentage points. According to DSW, this is due to a decline in the proportion of women on the employee side – from 40.2 percent in the previous year to 39.4 percent in 2020. On the shareholder side, there was an increase in the proportion of women from 33.3 to 33.9 percent.
The work is properly paid, at least in the very large companies. Overall, the companies evaluated by DSW paid around 83.1 million euros to their supervisory boards in 2020, 0.4 percent less than a year earlier. The main reason is the changed composition of the DAX. Siemens Energy, which advanced to the top tier of the stock market for Beiersdorf, was only charged proportionally because it was only listed on the stock exchange in September 2020. The corona crisis, which gnawed at the profits of many companies and thus dampened the variable remuneration, therefore played only a minor role.
Deutsche Bank pays the most
The highest remuneration was paid by Deutsche Bank, which distributed a good 6.1 million euros to its control body with 20 members. Its long-time boss, Paul Achleitner, also posted the highest salary among the domestic supervisory board chairmen at 802,083 euros.
BMW paid a total of 5.6 million euros to its supervisory boards, followed closely by Daimler with just under 5.5 million and a significant increase of 18.1 percent compared to 2019. The tire manufacturer Continental, however, recorded the highest growth with 32.2 percent – although the members of the Supervisory Board had waived ten percent of their base and committee remuneration for the months April to July 2020 due to the corona pandemic. Overall, however, the pandemic had a relatively minor impact on the remuneration of the supervisory boards.
Diekmann is the most influential
The title of most influential chairman of the supervisory board in 2020 went to the head of the supervisory board of the insurance group Allianz, Michael Diekmann. For this ranking of the most influential supervisory boards, the DSW evaluated information about the 40 companies currently listed in the leading DAX index. In order to evaluate the influence of the members of the supervisory board, the DSW awarded points for various offices in supervisory boards and committees.
In addition to Diekmann, the chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Post, Nikolaus von Bomhard, and Bayer AG, Norbert Winkeljohann, were among the most influential corporate controllers. The most influential 50 supervisory boards included only nine women – in the previous year 2019 there were twelve.
For 19 years, the DSW has been investigating, among other things, how the remuneration, transparency and workload of the supervisory board have changed – also with a view to overstretching with too many positions or too long periods on the supervisory board. Supervisory boards control the work of the board of directors and appoint, among other things, board members and heads of the group.