05 September 2006

steal my heart away

Look, I'm no bleeding communist and neither am I some uber-laissez-faire proselytiser but, when I read something like the following (from Today's Crikey.com.au), I get real mad:

Michael Pascoe writes:
It’s not hard to form the opinion that Alinta CEO Bob Browning seems to favour a rather greedy corporate culture. Perhaps in America, it would be called "ambitious" rather than "greedy", but you get the drift.
For a start there’s Alinta's’s outrageous fee gouge, nicely documented by
Alan Kohler – it makes Macquarie Bank and Babcock & Brown look like charities. Then there’s the swifty Alinta is trying to pull over the ACCC with its APT game, whereby it
gives an undertaking to get its AGL deal done and then tries to renege.
And now Alinta’s Browning is being held up as a
prime example of how CEOs are copping much bigger remuneration than their shareholders are being told about.
A study by governance advisers ISS Australia highlights how CEOs at the biggest companies are, on average, getting $2.5 million more than their shareholders know about it via a serious mismatch between the disclosed "fair value" of options in annual reports and what they are actually worth. Exhibit A, CEO Bob:
An example was Alinta, where the value of 40,000 options exercised by chief executive Bob Browning last year was 33.4 times the fair value placed on the options in the 2003 annual report.
The report disclosed a "fair value" per option of 20¢, which put a total value on the tranche at $8000. Mr Browning actually made $6.68 per option, exercising them at $4.52 each in 2005 when Alinta shares were trading at $11.20.
Somehow, one is not surprised. Among the other examples, BlueScope’s Kirby Adams picked up $4.4 million on options valued at $480,690 and Axa’s Les Owen’s $166, 650 "worth" of options actually came in at $1.6 million.
Now, let’s hear it again from some CEOs about how costs must be curtailed and the rising price of labour is a bad thing, never mind a lecture on the sanctity of transparency and disclosure.


There's no need to go into the details of how CEO salaries are set by boards on the advice of 'remuneration consultants' who are in on the joke, while the factory floor/front desk wages are set by cost competition downwards. But once you get to a level where you have control over the mechanisms, such as choice of accounting models and exactly how much gets disclosed, you are in a very privileged position. What the story describes is theft, nothing more or less. Stealing. Bring back the stocks, I say!

On the TV behind me, Tony Abbott is trying to justify the proposed sale of Medibank Private. As do many other lummoxes out here in the 'burbs I wonder: what happens when we've sold off everything and then government's have no ready made easy fixes to their inability to manage a budget? The story on the TV has just been rooned by the sound of the year 12 debater, Kim Beazley, speaking slowly, deliberately and unconvincingly about the issue. I've heard pieces of rock with greater persuasive powers.

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