The Michael Kors / Versace / Jimmy Choo NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score: 75.17 out of 100 — and for Capri Holdings, the company behind Michael Kors, Versace, and Jimmy Choo, that number tells a story of sharp contrasts. The political ledger is nearly clean. The legal record is spotless. But the wealth extraction story — the gap between what top executives took home and what the people staffing store counters earned — is where the brand’s glossy image starts to crack.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
93.9
Wealth Extraction
31.6
Playing by the Rules
100.0
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 93.87/100. Capri Holdings filed no federal lobbying disclosures and ran no Political Action Committee (PAC) from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period). What little political spending exists comes entirely from individual executive donations to candidates — a quieter, less visible form of influence.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 31.22/100. This is the lowest grade of the three, and by a wide margin. A CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 373-to-1, combined with a pattern of share buybacks, reveals a company that has consistently prioritized returns to shareholders and executives over the earnings of its frontline workforce.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. The public enforcement record shows zero regulatory fines over the tracked period. No penalties, no consent decrees, no settlements appear in the public docket.
Michael Kors / Versace / Jimmy Choo ranks 1st out of 3 companies in the Jewelry, Luggage, and Leather Goods Retailers sector — scoring 75.17 against a sector average of 55.8. That makes Capri Holdings the accountability leader among its tracked peers, though leading a short field is not the same as a clean bill of health.
The Bottom Line: The Handbag Empire That Paid Its CEO 373 Times What Its Store Workers Earned
Capri Holdings generated $3.47 billion in annual revenue selling luxury goods — items that trade on exclusivity, craftsmanship, and aspiration. Yet the people who sell those goods, process the returns, and keep the store lights on earned a median salary of $31,955 a year. At the same time, the company’s chief executive pocketed nearly $12 million. The single sharpest imbalance in this data isn’t a lobbying empire or a parade of regulatory fines — it’s the chasm between what the person at the top of the org chart earned and what the person at the register took home, reinforced by a pattern of channeling tens of millions of dollars into share buybacks rather than worker paychecks.
A Quiet Presence — Executive Checkbooks Instead of Lobbyists
Capri Holdings spent exactly $0 on federal lobbying from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, filed no Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) disclosures, retained no outside lobbying firms, and ran no PAC. For a publicly traded luxury conglomerate with three globally recognized brands, that is a notably small Washington footprint.
What does exist is subtler: individual executive donations totaling $48,646 across the two-year period, tracked by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). These contributions arrived in three clusters — $2,000 in Q3 2024, $21,646 in Q4 2024, and $25,000 in Q2 2026.
Individual executive donations do not carry the same transparency requirements as PAC spending. A PAC must disclose its donors and recipients quarterly; personal contributions from company executives flow through the FEC’s individual-contributions database under employer name — visible, but less prominently aggregated. The total here is modest by industry standards.
No revolving-door hires — former government officials brought in to exploit their agency connections — appear in the data. The government-influence operation at Capri Holdings, such as it is, runs lean.
A $12 Million CEO, $31,955 Workers, and a Buyback Program Workers Never Saw
This is where Capri Holdings’ numbers demand scrutiny. The company operates three luxury brands whose entire commercial proposition rests on the labor of designers, retail associates, warehouse workers, and customer service staff. The data tells a clear story about how that labor was valued.
The Pay Gap
The CEO pay ratio is 373:1, as disclosed in the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $11.9 million. The median Capri Holdings employee earned $31,955 that same year. A typical store associate would need to work for 373 years to earn what the CEO earned in twelve months.
The Buyback Machine
During the two-year tracking period, Capri Holdings spent $107 million buying back its own shares in fiscal 2024, then just $4 million in fiscal 2025 — a sharp slowdown. These are deliberate reductions in shares outstanding that inflate per-share metrics and trigger executive performance bonuses, a mechanism that directly benefits the executives who approve the spending. No dividend payouts are recorded across either year, meaning all capital returned to owners was concentrated in buybacks rather than split between traditional investor distributions and share repurchases — a more targeted approach that disproportionately rewards insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 11K employees
Spent on buybacks
$111.0M
directed to shareholders
÷ 11K
workers
Per-worker raise
$10,107
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 16% annual raise on the median worker's $31,955 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
The Missed Raise
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 10,982 workers a $10,107 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $5,054 annual raise the company chose not to give.
The buyback mechanism also feeds the executive pay gap directly. When a company buys back its own shares, it reduces the total number of shares in the market, which mechanically lifts Earnings Per Share (EPS) — a metric that sits at the heart of most executive bonus formulas. The same executives who approved the buyback program benefit personally from the EPS lift those purchases produced. The 373-to-1 pay ratio is not coincidental to that dynamic — it is inseparable from it.
The Tax Picture
Capri Holdings paid an effective tax rate of 25.4% — 4.4 percentage points above the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set. That headline rate, however, does not capture the full picture of how international arrangements shaped the bill. The company’s 10-K discloses that it uses the United Kingdom statutory tax rate of 25.0% as its base for reconciliation, reflecting its UK domicile, and that the effective rate for Fiscal 2025 was driven to an extraordinary level primarily by a $544 million rate-point increase attributable to a full valuation allowance recorded on deferred tax assets — the result of a three-year cumulative loss at the consolidated level. Underneath that one-time distortion, the reconciliation shows two significant rate-reducing items: a 27-percentage-point reduction from “Effects of global financing arrangements” and a further 10-point reduction from “Differences in tax effects on foreign income.” The filing discloses subsidiaries in Luxembourg and Switzerland, transfer-pricing arrangements in Italy, a tax audit settlement in Hong Kong, and its statutory domicile in the United Kingdom, though the 10-K does not explicitly connect each rate-reducing mechanism to a specific jurisdiction.
Statutory federal rate
21%
This company
25.4%
Michael Kors / Versace / Jimmy Choo's effective federal tax rate was 25.4% against the 21% statutory rate — -4.4 percentage points drained away.
The filing also discloses $82 million in unrecognized tax benefits as of March 28, 2026 — contested deductions Capri has claimed on its taxes that the Internal Revenue Service has not yet agreed are valid. Prior-year decreases in that balance were linked to a favorable Italian tax ruling on stock compensation and settlements of Italian transfer-pricing and Hong Kong corporate income tax audits.
A Spotless Public Record
The public enforcement database records zero fines, zero penalties, and zero regulatory settlements against Capri Holdings during the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. No government agency appears to have levied a monetary penalty against the company in the publicly available record.
No government subsidies appear in the public record either — meaning there is no subsidy-versus-fine contrast to draw here.
The absence of public enforcement action is genuinely notable for a company of this size, operating retail locations across the United States with nearly 11,000 employees. The data available here supports only one conclusion: no penalty appears on the public docket for the two-year tracked period.