Executive team also gets a 15% reduction in short-term incentives
Qantas has reduced $250,000 from the annual bonus of CEO Vanessa Hudson as a result of a cyber incident in July that compromised millions of customers' data.
The airline's board announced in its Annual Report that it reduced the short-term incentives of Hudson and its executives by 15 percentage points.
For the executive team, this is a total reduction of $550,000 in short-term incentives.
Qantas Group Chairman John Mullen attributed the reduction to the cyber incident in July that impacted its customers.
"In recognition of the seriousness of the incident, we decided to reduce 2024/25 short-term bonuses by 15 percentage points for the CEO and Executive Management," Mullen said in the report. "This decision demonstrates our commitment to creating a culture of accountability and ownership."
This leaves Hudson's annual short-term incentive at $2.04 million, as part of her $6.3 million total remuneration for the year ended 30 June.
Cyber incident at Qantas
Qantas' cyber incident occurred after a cyber criminal targeted one of the airline's call centres and gained access to a third-party customer servicing platform.
"There are six million customers that have service records in this platform," Qantas said in July.
"An initial review has confirmed the data includes some customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and frequent flyer numbers."
Qantas has since apologised for the incident, and has obtained an interim injunction to prevent stolen data from being viewed, released, used, transmitted, or published by anyone.
"We would like to reassure our customers that there continues to be no evidence that any personal data stolen from Qantas has been released but, with the support of specialist cyber security experts, we continue to actively monitor," the airline said in a string of updates.
Controversies at Qantas
Qantas has been in a series of controversies over the past months.
The Federal Court in August penalised the airline with $90 million after finding that it unlawfully outsourced ground handling during the pandemic.
"On behalf of the Board, I want to apologise to the 1,800 employees for the hurt and suffering they experienced as a result," Mullen said. "Qantas has accepted the Court's decision and has paid the fine and compensation, bringing closure on the matter."
Qantas also shut down earlier this year its Singapore-based low-cost airline Jetstar Asia, which led to the retrenchment of more than 500 employees in Singapore.
Hudson acknowledged the impacted Jetstar employees in her message in the Annual Report.
"All of its employees over that time can be extremely proud of their efforts creating and growing an airline that made such a difference to its customers," the CEO said.
"This strategic restructure, while difficult, enabled us to redeploy aircraft to our core businesses in Australia and recycle up to $500 million in capital to support our fleet renewal programme."
