WPP feuds with Sir Martin Sorrell over £600,000 of bonus payments

WPP’s feud with former boss Sir Martin Sorrell has dramatically escalated after the advertising giant sought to deny the tycoon £600,000 worth of bonus payments.

The company said the 76-year-old, who led the firm for 33 years from 1985 to 2018, had disqualified himself from the payouts by repeatedly leaking sensitive client information to a journalist while he was still at WPP.

But Sorrell immediately hit back at the ‘petty’ decision and said he had called in lawyers to contest it.

Sir Martin Sorrell (left) described WPP’s decision to to deny him £600,000 worth of bonus payments as ‘petty’. WPP is now run by Sorrell’s  former protege Mark Read (right)

The row is just the businessman’s latest exchange of hostilities with WPP, which is now run by his former protégé Mark Read.

Sorrell – who remains one of WPP’s top shareholders with a 2pc stake – previously called on Read to resign ‘before he is pushed’ and said the chief executive ‘won’t last’.

Relations between the two have been rocky since 2018, when Sorrell left WPP over issues including his expenses and conduct – allegations he denied.

He then launched a new rival agency, S4 Capital, and has sparred with his former firm over clients and takeover targets.

Responding to WPP’s move yesterday, Sorrell said it was ‘just another case of peanut envy’.

He said: ‘It’s a bit rich that they’re accusing me of leaks, given their own over the last three years.

‘They’ve had to go back several years to try and find an excuse to deny me what’s mine.

‘I’ve left it to my lawyers to deal with.’

He claimed WPP and Read were being driven by ‘blind rage’ and that the decision amounted to a ‘petty move, three years after I left, over a relatively small number of shares and with WPP’s recent poor share price performance’.

‘It’s nonsense,’ he added.

The row was revealed yesterday when WPP published its annual report, which said Sorrell would no longer receive shares awarded under the firm’s executive performance share plan (EPSP) in 2016 and 2017.

Annual reports show he had been awarded 1.2m shares under the scheme but because of his departure he could only receive a fraction of them at most.

Cristiana Falcone, the estranged wife of advertising tycoon Sir Martin Sorrell, pictured in 2009, has claimed she ‘totally lost’ her identity during their relationship – and insists marrying a rich man is ‘double the work’

Around £200,000 is thought to have been at stake from the 2016 award and another £400,000 for 2017.

However, WPP said the firm’s compensation committee had decided Sorrell’s stock should be left to lapse, invoking a clawback clause.

The firm said this was due to Sorrell’s ‘disclosure of confidential information belonging to WPP and certain of its clients to the media during his tenure as a WPP director’. 

It emerged last year that Sorrell was being divorced by his second wife, Cristiana Falcone, almost three years after he was accused of visiting a £300 prostitute in a Mayfair brothel.

The couple married in 2008 and have a young daughter, Bianca. Falcone could become one of Britain’s richest woman after splitting from Sir Martin, who is worth an estimated £269million according to the Sunday Times Rich List. 

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Falcone said people would regularly assume she had given up her job – or ask why she was still working given her husband’s fortune. Pictured together in May 2014

Speaking to the Sunday Times last year, Falcone said people would regularly assume she had given up her job – or ask why she was still working given her husband’s fortune.

‘I lost my identity [when I married] – it wasn’t superseded; I just totally lost it. Because I decided not to talk, someone else got my voice,’ she claimed, adding that she felt pigeonholed as ‘just a wife of’.

‘The assumption was that I wasn’t working… I am paying for that now. They put me in one category [wife], and this was my definition and I couldn’t get out of it.’

Their split came two years after Sir Martin quit advertising giant WPP amid allegations of misconduct and bullying of staff as well as claims the firm had been investigating whether Sir Martin had spent £300 of company money on a Mayfair prostitute in June 2017.

In the wake of the scandal Sir Martin rubbished the claims – and dismissed any suggestion of marital problems.