A rebellion is brewing in the ranks of shareholders

Chief executives across the Anglo-Saxon corporate world have been gorging themselves in recent years, but has the time come to start snatching away some of the plates?

It is possible to recall rather more innocent times when the pay of our business elite was not positioned way up in the stratosphere and when shareholders did not feel like pawns in a great financial game of chess.

Twenty years ago, the annual general meeting at an Irish plc was usually a sleepy enough affair, mainly populated by gentlemen in grey suits and a scattering of retired people.