U.K.’s 10 Top-Paid CEOs Earn $128 Million Total

Britain’s 10 highest-paid chief executives earned a combined $128 million in the latest financial year, according to a survey of pay among FTSE-100 index companies. Jean-Pierre Garnier, head of GlaxoSmithKline, earned the most--$31.95 million in base pay, bonus, shares and options--followed by Chris Gent of Vodafone Group, Bart Becht of Reckitt Benckiser and John Browne of BP, the survey by Bloomberg News showed.

CEOs were awarded similar levels of compensation the previous year, even as share prices plunged. Shares declined at eight of 10 companies with the best-paid executives. The FTSE-100, which measures the biggest publicly traded U.K. companies, has declined by a third since the beginning of 2001, wiping $808.91 billion off the value of the index’s companies.

“There doesn’t seem to be any connection between performance and reward,” said Alastair Ross Goobey, chairman of the International Corporate Governance Network, whose members control about $10 trillion of assets. British chief executives say their remuneration is still below that of their U.S. counterparts. Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric Co. was awarded $85 million last year, more than Garnier, Gent, Becht and Browne combined. The average U.S. CEO earned $7 million, according to a survey of 350 companies by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. That contrasts with $2.7 million in base pay, bonus, shares and options for FTSE-100 CEOs, according to Bloomberg calculations.