Quick straw poll: Is £250,000 a bad annual salary? Would earning that amount of money leave you struggling financially? For most of us, the very question is laughable – as in, we’d be laughing all the way to the bank were we ever to see that lofty number adorning our payslip, putting us squarely in the top 1 per cent of UK earners.
But ask a man called Frank Frulio, and you’d get a very different answer. The former global head of space services at Spire Global UK recently took his ex-employer to a tribunal, claiming he could not afford to work at the firm on his measly six-figure salary after bonuses were suspended. On top of the £250,000 base rate, he was expecting to receive an extra 60 per cent on top – equating to £151,800 – and claimed that, when this was not forthcoming, it “created a sense of panic, knowing that I could no longer afford to work at Spire”.
