By Jesús Aguado
MADRID (Reuters) -A Madrid court has cut a compensation payout awarded to banker Andrea Orcel over Santander’s withdrawal of a CEO job offer by about 16 million euros ($18.30 million) to 51.4 million euros, a court document seen by Reuters on Friday showed.
Orcel and Santander ended up in court after Spain’s largest bank dropped plans to make the former UBS investment banker its CEO as a result of a disagreement over his pay. Orcel had already left UBS to prepare for the new role.
The amended court ruling comes after both Orcel and Santander requested clarification from the judge on 35 million euros initially awarded to the Italian banker by the court on Dec. 10, the document showed.
The court nor Santander nor Orcel’s legal team were immediately available for comment.
In December, Madrid judge Javier Sanchez Beltran said Santander’s job offer letter to Orcel was a binding contract and that ruling still stands.
But in the court document seen on Friday Sanchez Beltran acknowledged that there was an error in the December ruling, and that Orcel was not entitled to tax equalisation as part of the buyout clause.
Orcel was entitled to 18.6 million without tax equalisation applied to the buyout clause, the judge said.
“The offer letter never mentioned tax equalisation,” Sanchez Beltran added in his written ruling.
($1 = 0.8745 euros)
(Reporting by Jesús Aguado; additional reporting by Emma Pinedo, editing Aislinn Laing and Jane Merriman)