So, last year, Bank of Valletta’s chairman, Gordon Cordina has given himself a salary increase of around €10,000 to bring his total annual salary to six figures. In principle, his salary is still low for the chairman of the biggest national bank, however, the problem is that this is not Gordon Cordina’s full-time role. Cordina’s full-time role is managing his consultancy firm E-Cubed which also receives public contracts from various government departments. The directors and the chairman himself of the bank are government appointees who are appointed merely to carry on the government’s interests in the bank (the government owns more than 25% of BOV). In addition, Cordina, along with other directors, doesn’t even have any skin in the game as he owns no shares of the bank he runs, so whatever happens to the bank, he wouldn’t be affected other than losing his salary.
Bank of Valletta needs a full-time executive director who leads the bank to grow and addresses its structural problems and a CEO focused on its operations and profitability. Until then BOV will be run by amateurs whose ultimate interest is to make the government happy while shareholders keep paying for the bank’s problems.
They made enough profit to get a pay rise but not enough to give a dividend to shareholders . Two weights two measured.