Commonwealth Bank boss Matt Comyn pockets huge wage rise as climate targets panned

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn has pocketed a 35 per cent pay rise after a jump in his long-term deferred equity reward.

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn delivers the banks latest results on Wednesday. Picture: CBA

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn has pocketed a huge, 35 per cent pay rise after the nation’s biggest lender reported a 9 per cent increase in annual net profit to $9.6bn.

Mr Comyn’s pay jumped from $5.2m to a touch under $7m, mainly due to a significant increase in his long-term deferred equity reward from $1.9m to $3.4m.

Remuneration committee chairman Peter O’Malley said the board had not exercised its discretion to reduce the remuneration outcome for any member of the CBA executive leadership team. They were all assessed as fully meeting their risk scorecards, and overall performance met or exceeded expectations.

The latter was measured against overall system growth, comparative performance, regulator assessments and market expectations.

In the bank’s first stand-alone climate report, Mr Comyn and the bank’s chairwoman Catherine Livingstone said they wanted CBA to play a leadership role in Australia transitioning to net-zero emissions by 2050.

“We see our role centring on financing the transition to a sustainable economy, helping our customers navigate the transition, and leading the transition conversation,” they said.

Climate scenario analysis had been completed for 74 per cent of customers, which would be used to inform strategy, lending decisions, and product and services development.

The bank had also set its first sector-level targets for reduction in financed emissions.

By 2025, CBA would have targets for sectors accounting for more than 75 per cent of financed emissions in 2020.

Despite this, Market Forces flagged a shareholder resolution at the CBA annual meeting on October 12. The activist group said CBA’s new targets fell short of what was required to limit global warming to 1.5C.

A more pressing concern was the bank’s “ongoing willingness to finance companies and projects expanding the scale of fossil fuels”.

“The International Energy Agency and other analysts have made clear that to keep global warming to 1.5C, there can be no further expansion of the fossil fuel industry,” the group said.

“However, CBA’s policy settings allow it to continue financing new oil and gas projects, and the companies pursuing them.

“Companies expanding the coal industry are also eligible to receive finance under the bank’s current policy settings.”

The shareholder resolution calls on the bank to demonstrate how the company’s financing will not be used for the purposes of new or expanded fossil fuel projects.

Market Forces said CBA had published targets for its financed emissions from power generation, upstream oil, upstream gas and thermal coal mining.

While the thermal coal mining target confirmed the bank’s commitment to phase out exposure to the sector by 2030, the remaining targets were either based on scenarios where emissions failed to reach net zero by 2050, or allowed the bank to increase its exposure to financed emissions between now and 2030.

“It’s disappointing CBA’s view is that, having achieved some positive declines in its financed emissions over the last year, this is taken as a licence to increase its exposure to carbon pollution from oil and gas in the coming eight years,” executive director Julien Vincent said.

“We need to pull out all the stops to keep global warming under control.

“The notion that CBA could increase its financed emissions in oil and gas over the rest of this decade is tone deaf to the urgency of the climate crisis.”

Originally published as Commonwealth Bank boss Matt Comyn pockets huge wage rise as climate targets panned