Did you look up the policy around increasing salaries? Because I can guarantee you there’s a policy for civil servants that either pegs salaries to inflation or pegs it to comparable wages in similar positions.

So the people who he hired went to apply existing policy, and he said “no.” And they said “OK.”

All seems perfectly reasonable to me. Salaries need to keep up with inflation when there’s no disposable income. At his level, there’s already plenty of disposable income, and he’s independently wealthy.