A nice little earner for senior executives at large public companies over the years has been the pensions wheeze. It works like this: first, agree an attractive salary plus share-based incentive package, but then add a cherry on top in the form of a “pension contribution”. Since the word “pension” is unthreatening – who isn’t in favour of planning for retirement? – this is the easiest part of the negotiation. Think in terms of 25% of basic salary in cash, with the possibility of more.

Time is finally being called on the ploy. The Investment Association, representing the fund management industry, started to make a fuss a year ago on grounds of fairness. If the workers received, say, a pension contribution worth 10% of salary, so should the executives, it said. The UK corporate governance code agrees.

António Horta-Osório, Lloyds’ chief executive, will now be bumped down to 15% of salary – having already gone from 46% to 33% – a change that will cost him £220,000. Bill Winters, boss of Standard Chartered, has also agreed to take a hit, having previously told his shareholders they were “immature” for protesting about his £474,000-a-year pension allowance. HSBC executives have fallen into line. Jes Staley, the Barclays boss who is currently on 17% of salary, will probably have to join his workers on 10% soon.

Should a great triumph for “restraint”, the word beloved by pay committees, be declared? Absolutely not, for two reasons.

First, the whole system of “pension contributions” is a nonsense. These senior individuals are usually pensioned up to the maximum already, meaning they’ve exhausted all the tax perks. Thus the “pension” label is a polite fiction because the money doesn’t have to paid into a pension scheme. These are cash supplements, paid and taxed as income.

Second, the pension cherry is not the main prize for your average senior executive. The big money is still made with those share-based incentives. Thus there is a danger in the talk about executives now getting “fair” pensions. Remuneration committees may congratulate themselves on striking a blow for equality and think they can ignore some stunningly unequal pay gaps.

Here, for example, is how the arithmetic works with Horta-Osório. His pay package last year was worth £6.27m, which was 169 times what the median earner at Lloyds received. If his new, and notionally fairer, pension arrangement had been in operation, the ratio would have been 159:1. A revolution has not occurred.

Achieving global tax harmony will take an age

You can’t blame Jeremy Corbyn for thinking that the best way to extract fairer tax receipts from tax-shy multinationals is to step outside internationally agreed practices and do your own thing. Achieving global harmonisation, especially at it relates to the taxation on digital companies, takes an age.

Look at the slow progress of a legislative proposal advanced by the European commission. This plan would force multinationals operating in Europe to disclose profits earned and taxes paid in each of the EU’s 28 member states. But the proposal is three years old: insistence on country-by-country was, in part, a response to the Panama Papers revelations of 2016.

EU government ministers will finally discuss the idea on Thursday, but what took so long? The short answer is that EU members are deeply divided. Some countries’ treasuries, such as Sweden’s, apparently think their high standards on transparency could be watered down. Others fear their tax receipts could suffer. Only the determination of Finland, current holder of the EU presidency, seems to have injected some life back into the legislative timetable.

The proposal, note, is mild. It’s not about changing tax rates; it’s about allowing outsiders to see financial information that companies already file to national tax authorities. It’s extraordinary that it could take three years for the EU even to contemplate such a small advance. In the world outside Brussels, voters are enraged by corporate secrecy over tax.

Is Avanti already in a pickle?

Most companies, if they had paid a team of 100 people to come up with the name Avanti for a new venture, would ask for a refund. The name is as dull as they come, and a quick Google search reveals it will be shared with a firm specialising in hygiene products.

FirstGroup and Trenitalia, on the other hand, are very proud of the name for their train franchise that will operate the west coast line. They even volunteered the detail that the creatives did their creating in an old pickle factory in London and a theatre in Amsterdam. This does not bode well.