(MENAFN- AFP) Anger over the 7.25 million euros that the head of French carmaker Renault took home last year has underlined President Francois Hollande's failure to rein in runaway executive pay.
Huge bonuses, "golden handshakes", lucrative stock options -- all these corporate goodies were supposed to come under much closer scrutiny after Hollande won the presidency in 2012.
But despite measures to cap salaries at public firms and a new code of conduct for private-sector bosses, the controversy over Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn's bumper pay package has shown how little has changed with a year to go before the next election.
Renault's shareholders -- which include the government itself with a 20-percent stake -- voted against Ghosn's remuneration, but it was still cleared by the company board.
Ghosn's defence did not win over many critics: "I consider myself like a football player or a Formula One driver -- there's a market."
The eye-watering salaries enjoyed by the heads of pharma giant Sanofi, telecoms company Alcatel-Lucent and carmaker PSA have also come in for criticism lately.
The average pay for CEOs at the biggest Paris firms went up six percent in 2014, to 4.2 million euros ($4.8 million), according to think tank Proxinvest.
That was nonetheless modest by comparison with the United States, where the average pay for CEOs was $13.8 million in 2014, according to the research firm Glassdoor Economic Research.
Financial newspaper Les Echos says executive pay in France was up another four percent in 2015, without even counting bonuses and other perks.
Meanwhile the French economy is in the doldrums, with unemployment stuck at around 10 percent.
"The government's plan has made some progress, but there are still some delinquents," said Loic Dessaint, head of Proxinvest.
"There's been a lot of noise, but whatever power the politicians have, they've shied away from more authoritarian measures," added Bernard Vivier of the Higher Institute of Labour, a Paris think tank.
- 'Failing model' -
The heads of state-owned companies have seen their salaries capped at 450,000 euros per year under Hollande.
For private companies, his government introduced a requirement that they submit executive pay to a vote by shareholders.
But these votes are not binding on the board of directors, and the limitations of the plan were laid bare at Renault.
Defenders of the rule say that even if the Renault shareholders were ignored, at least they had the chance to voice their disapproval officially -- a job usually left to unions, activists and politicians.
But Dessaint said self-regulation remains a "failing model".
He blamed the problem on France's corporate culture.
Boards of directors "don't see themselves as representing the shareholders, but as being in the service of the chairman," Dessaint said.
It is testament to France's left-leaning politics that leaders from across the political spectrum have come out against high executive pay.
Bruno Le Maire, bidding to be the right's presidential candidate in April 2017, is one of many calling for the shareholder votes to be binding.
Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, seen as being on the right flank of the ruling Socialists and a possible presidential candidate himself, has lashed out at the Renault board this week, saying they must meet again to "draw lessons" from the shareholder vote.
"If it does not... in the next few weeks, we will be forced to legislate," he said, without elaborating.
Bosses have warned that tighter rules on executive pay will discourage foreign investment.
But they may yet be overruled from Brussels, where an EU bill is currently doing the rounds that would give shareholders across Europe much tighter control over CEO salaries from 2018 onwards.
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