UniCredit board member did not quit due to alleged spat over CEO pay - chairman

MILAN (Reuters) - The former head of the remuneration committee and board member of UniCredit, Jayne-Anne Gadhia, did not quit the bank due to alleged disagreements over the pay package of CEO Andrea Orcel, the chairman of Italy's No.2 lender said on Friday.

UniCredit is proposing hiking Orcel's fixed salary by 30% while a corresponding increase in the variable pay would be tied to the group beating financial targets.

Hitting 2023 goals would leave Orcel with the same overall pay of up to 7.5 million euros ($5.33 million) as in 2022, making him one of Europe's best paid bank executives, thanks to a reduction in the compensation's variable component, which will be all in shares and spread over a longer period.

"The sug­ges­tion that Dame Jayne-Anne left the bank 'after skir­mishes ... over [chief exec­ut­ive] pay' is false, as we have repeatedly said", Chairman Pier Carlo Padoan said in a letter to the Financial Times, referring to an opinion piece published by the British newspaper on March 13.

($1 = 0.9378 euros)

(Reporting by Gianluca Semeraro; editing by Federico Maccioni)