Add another group to the list of irri-tants bothering the bosses of financial firms: shareholders. The long run of ever-expanding compensation for executives is under threat from investors on both sides of the Atlantic. Aviva, a British insurer with a downwardly mobile share price, announced on April 30th that its chief executive would forgo a planned pay rise because of shareholder criticism. The head of the compensation committee for Barclays was heckled at the bank's annual meeting in London on April 27th. Big American banks cleverly scheduled their meetings away from the clamouring mobs of Wall Street-Citigroup went as far as Dallas and declined to provide a webcast. But its efforts could not muffle the bang made by a non-binding shareholder vote against a ludicrous compensation scheme for Vikram Pandit, its chief executive.
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