The payment of £2m, due in 2022, to certain unnamed individuals at the ECB under a Long Term Incentive Plan has finally been picked up in the press. See this from the Guardian.
The Guardian has the story as an "Ali Martin exclusive", not so fast Mr Martin, SideOn first covered the payments in 2018. I'm not accusing the Guardian of nicking my stuff but claiming something as an exclusive which has been available in the ECB's accounts for three years seems a little rich. Still it's good the whole business is getting some scrutiny.
If the Guardian was looking for another exclusive they could do worse than this post, which showed ECB spending on staff salaries increased in the year to 31 January 2021 by more than £6m to over £43m. And I wonder whether there's a bit more to it than that.
Note 3 to the accounts which covers payroll costs includes the following, rather ambiguous, narrative explanation of why staff costs have increased by so much.
"As well as the change in the average number of employees, the increase is also due to higher player salaries linked to the new media rights cycle and one-off redundancy costs arising from the restructuring exercise during the year. These factors were offset by funds received from HMRC with respect to the furlough of staff during the year."
It's the last sentence I find particularly interesting. I read it as saying government furlough payments have been set against the total staff costs and the £43m of salary costs is a net figure. If that's the case total staff costs are even higher than disclosed in the accounts. How much higher we can't say because the furlough payments aren't separately disclosed. Some of the counties show furlough payments as a separate item in their accounts, and the amounts range from £0.5m to £1m. Maybe £2m for the ECB? If that guess is right then true staff costs are £45m and 2021 saw an increase of £8m.
And finally - a point I'll return to, I thought the Companies Act prohibited the setting off of income and expenditure items?
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