Dave Lewis did a decent turnaround job at Tesco, we can agree, but he’s been paid spectacularly well in the process – £29m over six years. It is why an artful manoeuvre within his £6.4m pay packet for his last full year in charge feels so grubby.

Tesco’s remuneration committee seems to have been shocked when it crunched the numbers on Lewis’s “performance share plan” for the 2017-20 period. A critical measure, relating to total shareholder return (TSR) – meaning share price growth plus dividends – did not show Tesco sitting pretty at the top of the class.

Far from it: the reading was minus 4.2% against a benchmark of peers. That meant zilch for Lewis on the TSR metric, which accounted for half the potential jackpot.

The remedy – or consideration of “relevant factors” to ensure a “fair outcome”, as the pay chair, Steve Golsby, put it painfully in Wednesday’s annual report – was to adjust the benchmark.

Golsby was referring to Ocado, whose share price has put everybody else’s in the shade. By ignoring Ocado, Tesco’s underperformance was turned into outperformance of 3.3%. Bingo. The tweak was worth £1.6m to Lewis and £900,000 to the finance director, Alan Stewart.

The supposed justification is that Ocado is more a technology company than a food retailer these days. That’s true, but Golsby was pushing his luck in claiming “a clear pattern” can be dated precisely to 16 May 2018.

That’s merely when Ocado signed its third licensing deal and its share price took off. But the upstart’s tech ambitions were public when Tesco selected its benchmark in 2017. Golsby’s committee made a choice back then; they just didn’t like the outcome.

Moving the pay goalposts after the game has finished is slippery behaviour. Tesco shareholders should insist that Golsby is replaced by a pay chair who possesses a backbone.

Aston Martin’s vision requires better numbers

“Having been in the business for a few weeks now I am even more enthusiastic and confident in the multi-year plan,” said Lawrence Stroll, Aston Martin’s new executive chairman. Outsiders are less bullish, one can infer from a share price that continues to backfire.

At 32p, down 16% on Wednesday, Aston Martin is worth only £490m – less than the combined injection of £171m from Stroll’s consortium plus a £353m rights issue a few weeks ago. The City is already asking if the rescue refinancing was big enough to prevent another liquidity crunch by the end of the year.

It’s a fair question since there are two possible medium-term outcomes to the Aston Martin saga. One is that Covid-19 wrecks Stroll’s revival plans and the company ends up in another ditch. The other is that the Canadian billionaire finds a way to muddle through.

The latter idea can’t be ruled out just yet. The first-quarter outcome – a loss of £119m before tax – was horrendous, but that was going to be the case even before coronavirus arrived. Stroll’s approach is to eradicate the excess of Aston Martins in dealerships, which means deliberately suppressing short-term revenues. The long-term aim is to create shortages, in effect, that encourage wealthy punters to beg for Aston Martins as they apparently do for Ferraris.

The strategy sounds sensible, but will anyone be pleading for a luxury sports car in the new recessionary world? And how much de-stocking, after a reduction of 428 cars in the first quarter, is left to do?

Stroll should not be underestimated, but his vision for the long term would surely be easier to realise if Aston Martin were not still towing £614m of net debt. For a refinancing that supposedly created room to breathe, the numbers already look tight.

Post-pandemic, let’s keep physical shareholder meetings

It was all a bit of a misunderstanding, says the asset manager Standard Life Aberdeen. It never had any intention of abolishing physical annual meetings of shareholders; the request for authority to hold more virtual electronic versions was merely a “just in case” measure.

There is no reason to doubt this account, but the defeat of the resolution on Tuesday should be welcomed anyway. Attendances are generally in decline, but the ability to question and cajole directors in person at an annual meeting is a fundamental principle of shareholder democracy.

After the muddle at Standard Life, let’s hope the message to others is clear: after the pandemic, do not even think about dropping physical meetings.