Shareholders approve potential €150m package tied to targets and tenure
About a third of Ryanair shareholders voted against Michael O’Leary’s latest pay package at the airline’s annual meeting in Dublin. Ryanair said it would publish the results later and said the votes approved the package by about 2-1.
The package, agreed over the summer, could be worth €150m (£129m). It would give O’Leary options on 10m shares if he meets profit and share-price targets and remains at the helm of the Irish carrier until 2032.
O’Leary also compared his competitors to “rapists,” a term he had used since the 2000s but had used less often publicly in recent times. He told reporters that people were “desperate to get to Ryanair’s low fares because they can’t afford to fly with the high-fare rapists around Europe.”
After O’Leary repeated the phrase and was challenged about whether the language was appropriate, he replied: “Absolutely.”
O’Leary separately continued to dispute Nats’ account of an air traffic control failure on Tuesday. The failure disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers flying in and out of the UK and cancelled more than 2,100 flights.
Martin Rolfe, the Nats chief, told the BBC on Tuesday: “This will be something we haven’t seen in more than 50 years of operation.” O’Leary accused Rolfe of “telling lies to save his own skin.”
A Ryanair spokesperson said Nats had told a call with the airline’s teams on Tuesday that the cause was a “spurious flight plan.” A flight plan caused an outage in 2023.
Nats said the latest problem occurred in its flight processing system but was not the same fault as the issues that caused outages and mass disruption in 2023 and 2025.
O’Leary also said Ryanair will dispute claims that any part of Ljubisa Karović’s body was sucked outside when the window beside him shattered on a flight from Greece to Germany in July. Karović, a 61-year-old Serbian businessman, was severely injured, and the aircraft landed in Greece after the incident.
Karović’s lawyer said sudden depressurisation pulled the passenger’s head and right arm through the opening before he was hauled back into the cabin. O’Leary told reporters after Ryanair’s annual meeting that Karović was “certainly sucked towards the window, but he didn’t get out the window.”
“He wasn’t partially out the window. Part of his face didn’t get out the window,” O’Leary said. “We don’t think any part of his body got out the window, but he was certainly sucked in very dramatic circumstances towards the window.”
O’Leary said Karović had been “belted into the seat.” He added: “We will be certainly at the end of the process disputing that he or any part of his anatomy will bend out the window.”
O’Leary said he was “not trying to downplay it” and that Ryanair would “have to await the outcome of the NTSB report.”
Karović told the Guardian that he believed his seatbelt kept him in the plane as he blacked out. His wife, Svetlana, said she watched her husband “half in and out of the plane” and said another passenger played a crucial part in bringing him back inside.
Svetlana said the unidentified passenger, believed to be Albanian, “did all he could to bring him in and then tried to block the window, first with a bag that was immediately sucked out and then with a suitcase, which worked.”
The US National Transportation Safety Board is leading the accident investigation, with Boeing’s 737 aircraft, engine manufacturer GE and Ryanair involved.