Tag: UK

Allan Leighton, Royal Mail’s chairman, has raised the stakes in the controversy over employee share ownership by asking for support from the 180,000 workforce.
Mr Leighton is this week writing to all Royal Mail’s staff about the scheme, which has angered the main postal union and caused widespread concern among Labour politicians. He has asked for their backing in a move that he hopes will kill off arguments against the scheme, which many see as the first step towards privatisation. Mr Leighton’s appeal comes as the Communication Workers Union is preparing to ballot its members over whether they want Royal Mail to remain in public ownership.

The seven non-executive directors of the Royal Mail have issued a dramatic ultimatum to Gordon Brown, the chancellor: approve a pounds 1.5bn cash injection for the business or they will resign en masse in just two and a half months’ time. They are backing Allan Leighton, the chairman of Royal Mail, who is proposing a rights issue in which additional shares would be sold to the Government, which already owns the company. Of the money raised, pounds 1bn will be injected into the Royal Mail’s pension scheme and pounds 500m spent on automating the sorting of letters. Simultaneously, Leighton wants 20 per cent of the shares in Royal Mail to go into an employee trust in order to incentivise the 200,000 staff to support a modernisation programme, which could include more redundancies on top of the 30,000 already announced. The non-executive directors are among some of the most heavyweight figures in the City. They are: Sir Michael Hodgkinson, a former chief executive of BAA, Richard Handover, the ex-chairman of WH Smith, David Fish, the chairman of United Biscuits, Helen Weir, group finance director of Lloyds TSB, Bob Wigley, the chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe, Lady Prosser, a Labour peeress, and John Neill, the chief executive of Unipart.