Corbett declines ?187,000 bonus at Woolworths

Former Railtrack chief executive Gerald Corbett has sidestepped another row over bonuses by declining to accept a £187,000 performance payment due to him in his role as executive chairman of retailer Woolworths.

Mr Corbett, who controversially picked up £1.3m when he quit Railtrack, told a Woolworths board meeting on Tuesday that he would not take his bonus because a fall in profits meant the group's store managers would not qualify for their performance payments.

"Gerald felt it was not appropriate for him to take a bonus if the store managers weren't getting theirs," a Woolworths spokeswoman said.

The retailer has issued two profits warnings since being spun out of B&Q owner Kingfisher six months ago.

Mr Corbett was still eligible for a bonus worth up to half of his £375,000 annual salary because its payment was linked to the combined performance of Woolworths' share price, debt position and earnings. He picked up £500,000 for overseeing the demerger.

Mr Corbett and fellow Woolworths directors feared that if he had accepted his new bonus it might have caused a similar row to the one that blew up when Marks & Spencer's chairman Luc Vandevelde claimed an £816,000 performance payment for hitting certain targets. Mr Vandevelde eventually waived his bonus.

Mr Corbett last year publicly defended his Railtrack bonus, saying the difficulty of the job necessitated a hefty compensation package. Friends say he was nevertheless privately shocked by the hostility of the public and that influenced his decision on the Woolworths payment.

Analysts downgraded their forecasts for Woolworths yesterday for a second successive day. The group's failure to cash in on the Christmas selling season has prompted Schroder Salomon Smith Barney to cut pretax profit forecasts for 2002 by 67% to £15m.