Now a story from the other end of the scale. While it happened in France, it’s a common enough tale of executive excess that illustrates the two-tier society that is being created across the Western World, with an executive elite that lives by different rules to the rest of the population.
With his company in the midst of a takeover by Nokia, Michel Combes, the chief executive of Alcatel, has decided he doesn’t want to hang around to oversee the completion of a deal he helped to create, and has left to become chief operating officer of Altice, an operator of telecom networks.
The French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche has given him some stick for this, saying he could nonetheless receive Alcatel stock worth €13.7m (£10m) by 2018.
Plus ça change, you might well think, given the standards of behaviour commonly associated with life in executive-land.
What makes this story stand out is that the French are not only making a fuss about it – Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron described the departure as “shocking” “unacceptable” and “bad corporate behaviour” – they are actually proposing to do something about it.
The Financial Markets Authority (AMF) is investigating to see if the package violates corporate governance rules while a corporate governance committee set up by French companies is also taking a look.
If they do decide to take action they will set an example that their counterparts on this side of the channel – where this sort of story is depressingly common – would do rather well to follow.
