Ex-RFU official ‘extremely comfortable’ with bonuses

A former senior official has defended the bonus scheme, which gave Rugby Football Union CEO Bill Sweeney an additional £358, 000 in the same year the organization lost jobs and received bonuses.

Genevieve Shore, the ex-chair of the RFU’s remuneration committee, says she is “extremely comfortable” with the scheme.

With an increased salary of £742, 000, Sweeney was paid a total of £1.1m in the 2023-24 financial year.

A grassroots uprising has resulted in calls for Sweeney to be fired as a result of his and other executives’ compensation packages.

Shore explained: “I feel the RFU board is run incredibly professionally and lives up to any FTSE 100]a collection of the UK’s biggest publicly-listed companies] standard.

You can only ask if the executive team has met the goals that were set for them.

Shore was a member of the board that developed the long-term incentive plan (LTIP) before she left the RFU in 2022.

The LTIP was designed to retain senior executive staff during and after the Covid pandemic, with target-linked bonuses at its conclusion.

Shore, who is currently the executive chair of Premiership Women’s Rugby, said, “I’m very comfortable with all the governance that took place at the time and the communication that took place.

” What happened after 2022, I obviously don’t know, but I feel like it was all set up and in a good place.

“I’ve worked across remuneration in many organisations.

Can we leave Covid and keep that team together through Covid? was our question.

The majority of the team stayed during that time period, according to the LTIP, which it was supposed to do.

An executive team and a board’s task is to establish succession planning and ensure that an LTIP transition is fairly seamless.

“You either re-up, or you change your team. That’s always a fine-grain decision that an executive team has to make”.

Former RFU chairman Tom Ilube, part of the RFU remuneration committee that approved Sweeney’s recent bonus, stepped down in December.