Discovery exec Neville Koopowitz earns $5 million salary

Neville Koopowitz, head of Discovery Group’s U.K. health business, earned more than $4.9 million in the company’s latest financial year, making him the highest-paid executive at the South African financial services group — ahead of founder and CEO Adrian Gore.

Koopowitz’s total compensation included a base salary of about $1.3 million and additional performance and long-term incentive awards that pushed the total well above Gore’s $2 million package. The disclosure came in Discovery’s annual report for the year ended June 30.

Gore, who founded Discovery in 1992 and turned it into one of the country’s most valuable financial services companies, took home a base salary of roughly $500,000, with the remainder coming from incentive payments. The pay gap underscores the growing importance of the group’s U.K. arm, Vitality Health, which has become a key driver of Discovery’s earnings.

Discovery reported normalized profit from operations of about $800 million for the year, reflecting the company’s expanding global footprint. But the size of Koopowitz’s compensation package is likely to raise questions from investors and governance watchers about how executive pay is structured.

Koopowitz’s salary, paid in pounds and converted into U.S. dollars, highlights how foreign-based executives can end up topping local pay tables in multinational companies.

The company is expected to face scrutiny from shareholders at its next annual meeting over the scale of the pay gap and how closely executive rewards are tied to performance.

(Conversion based on an exchange rate of roughly ZAR 18.8 to $1.)