On the one hand, we pillory the chap who extracted £500m from a dying chain of shops and then walked away from the corpse.
On the other, we have a chappess who is not in the pillory, but who took £100m (say) from a sick technology company (Yahoo) in pay and benefits and who will probably now be invited to spend more time with her family.
Both of these characters spent something under 5 years with their charges, although I suspect that the chappess worked a bit harder at trying to put some life back into hers.
The chap actually owned his company, while the chappess was - still is for the moment - a senior employee. It was not her money in the game, just her reputation.
The shareholders at the sick technology company were probably content to bung someone a lot of money in the possibly forlorn hope of that someone bringing some life to the price of their shares. They thought that it was worth taking the chance that one well paid person might add serious value to a serious problem. What else could they do?
On the other hand, the lady in question was probably already very rich, at least by the standards of suburban Epsom. She was not that unhappy spending more time with her family, or her dahlias or whatever. But she neither was she that averse to going back to a high status job for a salary which would put her firmly among the movers and shakers. It was probably not the money itself which moved her, rather the prestige and status which came with it, with it being known that she was one of the highest paid executives in the land. And she rather liked the idea of swanning around the town in a corporate helicopter with a lot of pretty Ivy League flunkies to fawn on her. Not so unlike our own queen in her prime. Or her own president.
All of which leaves me in rather a muddle. I think the world has got it roughly right, with the chap in the pillory and the chappess not. But I still find it a bit distasteful that she was paid so much.
PS: I wonder if she likes to be seen at church every Sunday - rather in the way of queens and presidents.
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