Singapore telecoms company slashes CEO’s salary over outages

The chief executive of Singapore’s largest and oldest telecommunications company took a pay cut last year despite the company posting a sharp rise in profits, after a series of network failures dented its operational record.Singtel CEO Yuen Kuan Moon received S$6.8 million (US$5.3 million) for the financial year ended March 31, down 16.9 per cent from S$8.2 million a year earlier, according to the company’s annual report released on Tuesday and first reported by The Straits Times.The pay cut came even as Singtel’s net profit rose 39.5 per cent to S$5.6 billion and underlying net profit increased 12 per cent to S$2.8 billion.The company said the reduction in pay reflected “material operational and reputational issues”, including network outages at its Australian subsidiary Optus and disruptions in Singapore.A customer waits for service at an Optus store in Sydney, Australia. Optus is a subsidiary of Singtel. Photo: APIn its annual report, quoted by The Business Times, Singtel said its board had taken into account both local network failures and the Optus “triple zero” incident last year – a massive 14-hour network failure in September that blocked hundreds of emergency calls across Australia – when “determining the appropriate pay outcome for the group CEO”.