Sir Martin Sorrell is not going to give up his title as Britain’s highest-paid chief executive any time soon.

It has just been announced that last year the advertising mogul was awarded shares worth £41.6 million in his company, WPP, taking his pay packet in the last five years to over £200 million.

In the past Sir Martin, who is 72, has faced criticism for his vast payouts from WPP, with shareholders rejecting the company's remuneration report in 2012. 

But he has always robustly defended the amount he is paid, saying that he has given 30 years of his life to WPP, which he transformed from a wire basket manufacturer into a global marketing business.

“I’m not a Johnny come lately who picked a company up and turned it round [for a big pay day],” he told an Advertisng Week Europe event in London last year. “If it was one five-year plan and we buggered off, fine [to criticise my pay]. Over those 31 years … I have taken a significant degree of risk. [WPP] is where my wealth is. It is long effort over a long period of time.”

Sir Martin, whose wife gave birth to his fourth child in November, has built WPP into a conglomerate that includes Ogilvy & Mather and J Walter Thompson, among others.