Heads of Merko and LHV made €50,000 a month last year

Looking at companies listed on the Tallinn exchange, CEO of construction company Merko Ehitus Andres Trink made €600,000 last year with a monthly salary of €50,000. The average board member of a listed company made €260,000 annually.
Publicly traded companies have been required for the past three years to disclose in their annual reports the salaries paid to their board members.
The purpose of this disclosure is to enhance the trust, transparency and accountability of publicly traded companies in the eyes of shareholders and potential investors.
At the top of the salary scale for companies listed on Nasdaq Tallinn are the leaders of Merko Ehitus and LHV Group, while the heads of Harju Elekter and Tallinna Vesi are at the bottom.
Last year, the highest compensation was earned by Andres Trink, chairman of the board of Merko Ehitus, who received a total of over €600,000 in base salary and bonuses, approximately €50,000 per month. In 2022, Trink earned approximately a quarter less.
It should be noted that since Trink's employment contract expired at the end of the year, he was also paid compensation to prevent him from joining a competitor. He also received an advance portion of the performance bonus calculated for 2023. The current CEO of Merko Group is Ivo Volkov.
Other members of Merko's board also earned significant amounts – Tõnu Toomik a total of €476,000 and Urmas Somelar €305,000 for seven months.
In 2023, Eften Real Estate Fund did not pay any compensation to its two board members, Viljar Arakas and Tõnu Uustalu, as they are also members of the management team of the fund manager.
Arakas is a member of the board of fund manager Eften Capital and Uustalu is the head of Eften Capital's investment department. Therefore, their compensation details are not available in the annual report of the publicly traded company.
Some listed companies pay executives in options
In addition to the leaders of Merko, executives at LHV also earned high compensation. Unlike most publicly traded companies, LHV awards its executives with options as part of their performance bonuses, which allow them to purchase LHV shares at below-market prices after three years. However, the earliest the company's executives can convert these options into cash is after four years.
For instance, as a performance bonus, LHV's board chair Madis Toomsalu was granted options valued at €384,000, while other board members received options worth €312,000. Including Toomsalu's base salary of €192,000, his total income for the previous year amounted to €576,000.
In 2023, Toomsalu earned €75,000 or 15 percent more than the previous year through his base salary and options.
A similar option program is also in place at Coop Bank. Coop CEO Margus Rink earned a base salary of €156,000, a cash performance bonus of €36,000 and was additionally granted 71,900 options valued at €108,000. In total, Rink earned €300,000 in 2023, which is €34,000 or 13 percent more than the previous year.
Port of Tallinn CEO Valdo Kalm earned €216,000 last year, while the CEO of Enefit Green Aavo Kärmas earned €169,000. The majority of the shares of both Port of Tallinn and Enefit Green, which is owned by Eesti Energia, are held by the Estonian state.
While the monthly equivalent of the salaries of the leaders of Merko and LHV was around €50,000, Port of Tallinn's leader Valdo Kalm earned about €18,000 per month and Enefit Green's leader Aavo Kärmas €14,000 per month. Unlike LHV or Coop, no stock options are offered as part of the performance bonuses for the management of Port of Tallinn or Enefit Green.
CEO of Pro Kapital Edoardo Preatoni earned a total of €350,000 last year, the same salary as in 2022. Raul Puusepp, who leads the Tallinn Kaubamaja Group (now known as TKM Group), earned €333,000, which is 20 percent more than the previous year.
CEO of Harju Elekter Tiit Atso earned a total of €160,000 last year, while the board chair of Tallinna Vesi Aleksandr Timofejev earned €129,000.
Some publicly traded companies, such as Hepsor and Nordecon, have not yet published their compensation reports.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski