London - British budget airline easyJet said 45% of voting investors had protested against its 2013 pay plans for directors at its annual meeting on Thursday.
The FTSE 100 company's founder and largest investor Stelios Haji-Ioannou has had numerous dispute with easyJet's board in recent years and has repeatedly criticised the multi-million pound pay packages awarded to its top executives.
Haji-Ioannou, better known as Stelios, owns 25.9% of easyJet's shares, according to Thomson Reuters data, while his family members have an 11% stake through a company called Polys Holdings.
He founded easyJet in 1995 before quitting the airline's board in 2010 after a row over strategy. Since then he has been critical of many of the airline's plans.
EasyJet, whose annual profits leaped 51% in its financial year to last September, said 45% of the votes polled were opposed to the pay deal.
According to the company's annual report, published in December last year, easyJet's chief executive Carolyn McCall was in 2013 paid a base salary of £665 000 and earned a total £6.4m including a bonus and other sorts of benefit and share awards, nearly double what she took home the year before.
McCall received the lowest protest vote of all the directors.
Last year did not see a repeat of the "shareholder spring" of 2012 when investors joined forces to protest against pay packages and executives alike. This year's season of annual meetings is just kicking off.
At its 2013 annual meeting, 44.7% of voting investors went against easyJet's directors' pay plans for its last financial year.