Celtic Directors awarded 62% pay rise

Tom Allison, Brian Wilson and Dermot Desmond have been awarded 62.5% pay rises to take their Celtic salaries from £25,000 up to £40,000. Ian Bankier also picks up that figure as a salary after stepping down as Chairman.

Clocking in for a monthly board meeting is all that is required from the Non Executive Directors who turn up on matchdays to enjoy the best of hospitality and first class travel and expenses. Desmond hasn’t attended an AGM  in more than a decade.

The cost of Season Tickets this season increased by an average of 3% with two non- SPFL Premiership matches removed from the package.

Allison, Wilson and Bankier form the Remuneration Committee that pushed Peter Lawwell’s salary and bonus package through the £3.5m barrier on turnover of £83.4m for the year to 30 June 2019.

That year included losing to AEK Athens in the third qualifying round for the Champions League, losing Dedryck Boyata, a World Cup semi-finalist in 2018 for nothing when his contract expired and a managerial recruitment process that discarded all applicants to offer the job in the Hampden showers. A decision that was to prove very costly with future Champions League places lost to Cluj and Ferencvaros, with both sides winning at Celtic Park.

Wilson has been a non-executive Director since 2005 and is a former Labour MP, with a Conservative Government in Westminster and SNP in Holyrood his influence in political circles is almost non-existent. He also writes for various unionist newspapers and pens obituaries for the Guardian.

Allison has been a non-executive Director since 2001 and is a former colleague of Peter Lawwell at Clydeport.

In 1995, while with Burn Stewart, Bankier helped set up an associate Director role for Bill Thornburn with the old Rangers club at a cost of £1m. It is unknown if Bankier has ever brought in a deal of similar value to Celtic. That ‘investment’ was worthless when Rangers went into liquidation in 2012.

CLICK HERE for Celtic Annual Report for 2023.