Martin Gilbert ends difficult week with appointment to Sky board

Aberdeen Asset Management founder and chief executive Martin Gilbert has been named deputy chair of satellite TV operator Sky.

News of the appointment comes as it was also announced that Rupert Murdoch’s son James is returning to his role as chairman of the business, four years after he resigned in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

The appointment comes at the end of a busy week for Mr Gilbert who had to negotiate a shareholder revolt along with the rest of the Aberdeen board as they pledged to make its remuneration report more “transparent”.

The promise was prompted by a 34 per cent vote against the company’s remuneration report at its annual general meeting in Aberdeen on Wednesday.

While some reports likened the revolt to episodes during the “shareholder spring” of 2012 which contributed to the removal of a number of chief executives over high pay, including Sly Bailey of Trinity Mirror and Andrew Moss at Aviva.

But Aberdeen, which also this week revealed an eleventh consecutive quarter of outflows, as investors including sovereign wealth funds continued to pull money out of Aberdeen funds, said the revolt was over “technical points” it had failed to make clear in the drafting of their 2015 report, namely setting out “performance conditions and hurdles” for variable pay awards, rather than spiralling packages for executives.

Chief executive Martin Gilbert said his pay package was reduced to £4.3million last year, down from £4.7million in 2014.

The firm said investors pulled £9.1billion from Aberdeen-managed funds in the quarter to the end of December 2015 as turmoil hit the firm’s stakes in emerging and Asian markets.