QinetiQ chief nets bonus despite £19m loss

The head of the Government's defence research agency, which is being privatised this autumn, received a £98,000 bonus for nine months work last year, even though the business sank £19m into the red.

Sir John Chisholm, the chief executive of QinetiQ, also earned a basic salary of £163,500, taking his total pay package to £281,000.

QinetiQ, the commercial arm of the former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, was due to have been floated on the stock market earlier this year. But the Government was forced to abandon the offering because of the collapse in technology stocks and now plans to sell a major stake in QinetiQ to a "strategic investor" later this year.

The business, which came into operation in July last year, made an operating profit of £42.7m for the nine months to the end of March, 2002. But this turned into a bottom line after-tax loss of £19.1m after £34.3m of one-off charges.

These included a £20m impairment charge to reflect the fall in the value of some of QinetiQ's properties and a £14m charge to cover restructuring ahead of the company's part-privatisation. Of this £14m, about £7.7m was made up of fees paid to various advisers including NM Rothschild, KPMG, Herbert Smith and the disgraced firm of auditors Andersen.

Sir John Egan, who quit as chairman of QinetiQ in May after falling out with the Ministry of Defence, was paid £93,800 for the nine-month period. Bonuses totalling a further £133,600 were paid to two other executive directors – the chief financial officer Graham Love and Hal Kruth, the head of the company's US arm QinetiQ Inc.

The new chairman, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Government's Joint Intelligence Committee and deputy head of MI6, said Sir John's departure would not affect the move to become a public private partnership.

A shortlist of four to six bidders has been drawn up including Carlyle Group, the US private equity group that has John Major as its European chairman.