You don’t need telling that the onset of the worst global recession since the 1930s has led to a sharp rise in bankruptcies among small businesses and to hundreds of thousands of job losses.

But 2008 wasn’t especially painful for a typical chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, according to a new independent survey by Manifest, the “governance” service that advises big investors.

It calculates that the median total remuneration for a FTSE 100 chief executive rose 7% last year to £2.6m.

BBC, Robert Peston,  Tuesday, 2 June 2009 08:39 AM