Wellesley directors were paid more than £900,000 last year
WELLESLEY & Co’s directors collectively pocketed £923,000 last year, while the property lender reported a full-year loss of £210,288.
Chief executive and founder Graham Wellesley was awarded the highest salary of £342,000, while co-founder Andrew Turnbull took home £244,000, according to the latest annual report filed with Companies House earlier this month.
Former Lloyds Banking Group chief executive Eric Daniels, who stepped down as non-executive chairman at the end of May 2016, received £50,000. Daniels has now joined the board of Funding Circle.
The directors’ collective remuneration was lower than 2015, when they were paid just under £1.3m. Individual salaries were not specified in the previous report, although it revealed that the highest-paid director received £379,868.
The lender, which narrowly avoided being struck off for filing late accounts last December and was reportedly struggling to stay afloat earlier this year, last month put its peer-to-peer lending activities “on pause” as part of a number of changes to the business.
Although the firm reported a loss of £210,288 for 2016, this was an improvement from the previous year’s loss of £2.2m. It swung back into the black in the second half of 2016, when it posted a £1.3m pre-tax profit.
“I am pleased to see the progress which the management team has made in the past year in an industry which is in a period of transition,” said chairman David Godfrey last month.
“We returned to profit in the second-half of the year, a trend we expect to continue through the first half of 2017, and management is developing a strong platform on which to build Wellesley’s future growth and long-term success.
Read more: Wellesley stops offering longer-term P2P loans to investors
“Wellesley’s business model proved attractive to investors and enabled us to lend more than £100m to developers, supporting the creation of 822 mid-priced homes across the country, taking the total since the firm’s inception above 2,000.”