Macquarie Group chief executive Nicholas Moore pocketed $7.8 million in the same year the company posted a 24 per cent drop in profit and shed more than 1,300 jobs.
Significantly lower levels of investment activity continued to hit Macquarie’s capital market businesses in the year to March 31, and measures to cut costs were unable to offset profit falls.
Macquarie shed 1,354 positions in the 12 months to March, or nine per cent of its workforce, taking total employees to 14,202.
The greatest number of job losses came from its Macquarie Securities business, which was also the worst performer in the group.
One-third of staff, or 581 positions, in Macquarie Securities were moved on.
“They were made for a range of reasons but all coming back to trying to do things more efficiently and more effectively,” Mr Moore told reporters on Friday. “We did have duplication within the organisation.
“We had two settlement areas, we had three systems that would do the same thing.”
Macquarie Securities suffered a $378 million turnaround in full year performance to post a loss of $194 million for the year to March 31.
Macquarie Capital, which conducts corporate capital and merger and acquisition deals, had a 60 per cent drop in full year profit to $85 million.
Those falls contributed to Macquarie Group’s profit for the year to March to $730 million, down from the previous year’s $956 million.
Mr Moore said he expected Macquarie Group’s performance to improve in fiscal 2013 as long as market conditions don’t deteriorate.
He said he hoped Europe’s debt problems were not worsening, and indicated a cut to the cash rate by the Reserve Bank of Australia could boost investor confidence in the short term.
“Australia is a very important part of our business and there’s a number of measures coming out of Australia which should give people some degree of confidence,” Mr Moore said. “We would normally expect (a cash rate cut) to be good from a confidence viewpoint.
“It makes the cost of capital cheaper, whether it be housing or anything else, and secondly it could have an impact on the dollar and we know a lot of businesses are suffering as a result of the high dollar.”
Mr Moore’s remuneration in the year to March totalled $7.79 million, down 10 per cent from $8.69 million in the previous year.
More than half of that pay is in the form of equity, while $2.05 million in cash is paid as a profit share.
Other top executives had similar-size cuts to their remuneration, with the exception of the head of Macquarie Funds Shemara Wikramanayake, whose remuneration increased by 31 per cent to $7.36 million.
Macquarie declared an unfranked final dividend of 75 cents per share, taking total dividends for the 12 months to $1.40, unfranked.
Its shares were up 90 cents or 3.17 per cent at $29.33 at 1532 AEST Friday.
