Jeff Fairburn had said he would donate ‘substantial proportion’ of payout following outcry

Jeff Fairburn, the former chief executive of the housebuilder Persimmon, has failed to set up a charity almost a year after pledging to do so in an attempt to assuage public and political anger at his “obscene” £75m bonus.

Fairburn has not registered a charity with the Charity Commission or made any inquiries about how to set one up, 10 months after he said he would donate a “substantial proportion” of his bonus to a charitable trust. Fairburn declined to comment.

He was ousted last month after the company said his mammoth pay deal had become a “distraction”.

Shortly before Fairburn was asked to leave the business, the row reignited when he walked out of a TV interview having refused to answer questions about his taxpayer-fuelled bonus. Fairburn told the BBC journalist it was “really unfortunate that you’ve done that [asked about the bonus]”, before walking out of shot.

Play Video 0:46 Persimmon CEO walks away from interview when asked about £75m bonus – video

In his resignation statement last month, Fairburn said: “I had hoped that revealing my plans to create a charitable trust and to waive a proportion of the award would enable the company to put the issue of the 2012 LTIP [long-term incentive plan] behind it.

“However, this has not been the case and so it is clearly now in the best interests of Persimmon that I should step down.”

A Charity Commission spokeswoman said: “[We have] no record of a registered charity bearing Jeff Fairburn’s name. It is not possible to confirm whether or not funds have been donated via another charity.”

Fairburn may have donated to other charities. He did not respond to requests for comment about his charitable giving. A spokeswoman for Persimmon said: “Afraid it’s a no comment from Jeff.”

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Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, a thinktank that monitors executive pay, said Fairburn’s failure to fulfil his promise was an “acute embarrassment to the reputation of British business and our flawed economic system.

“This highlights the problems with allowing super-rich executives to capture vast incomes at the expense of the wider workforce, and then rely on whimsical charitable donations to address the arising social issues. This approach is particularly likely to be unsuccessful when those charitable donations fail to materialise,” he said.

The Guardian calculated a year ago, when Fairburn’s £75m windfall first came to light, that a donation of £4.6m – 6% of his bonus – could provide a home for all of the 58 families that were homeless at the time in York, where Persimmon is based.

Peter Robinson, the director of the York youth homelessness charity Sash, said a donation of £1m could guarantee that the charity has the funds to help homeless teenagers for four years.

Robinson said it was “disappointing to hear that after nearly a year has gone by, there is no sign of the charitable trust that Mr Fairburn promised to set up”.

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“Given that Mr Fairburn received such a staggering amount of money from a housing market that is acknowledged to be in crisis, we do think it would be very appropriate for him to distribute some of this to causes like ours that work with people who in many ways are at the sharp end of that crisis,” he said.

There are a record 320,000 homeless people in the UK, according to Shelter. Last year, 597 homeless people died on the streets or in temporary accommodation in England and Wales, an increase of 24% in five years, according to the first government figures on the issue. On Wednesday, a homeless man became the second rough sleeper to die outside parliament this year after he collapsed in a stairwell.

Greg Beales, the campaigns director of the housing charity Shelter, said: “Since this bonus payment was mooted, another 10,000 people have become homeless in the UK. This is now a national emergency, and it’s up to everyone to step up to help to end it – including the developers making vast profits from a system failing so many.”

The Persimmon bonus scheme, believed to be the most generous to date from a FTSE 100 company, paid out about £500m of shares to 150 senior staff. Fairburn had been in line for a £110m payout before it was scaled back in the face of political and public outrage.

The vast bonuses result from a scheme linked to the housebuilder’s share price, which soared thanks to the taxpayer-backed help-to-buy programme. About half of Persimmon’s homes are bought with the assistance of the government scheme.

Speaking last year, Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said the scale of the bonus was “obscene” and built on a government subsidy.

“It is reminiscent of the worst excesses of corporate greed that helped to create the financial crisis, when short-termism was heavily incentivised and long-term planning ignored,” he said.