In an emergency you always know the way out of a building because all the rats are headed in the direction of the exit. That scenario is no different from that of the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy where top executives wrote themselves huge checks just before the S.S. Lehman sank into the sea of greed. If I were on a sinking ship, I'd want a nice life raft with supplies to last for at least a few days. At Lehman's, they went a step beyond and the five guys at the top tried to gold-plate their raft with more than $100 million dollars.
From The Times of London:
THE Lehman Brothers board signed off on more than $100m (£59m) in payouts to five top executives just three days before the bank went bankrupt leaving thousands of employees out of work in London.
The payoffs, approved on September 12 by the Wall Street giant’s compensation committee, included over $24m in severance packages to the collapsed firm’s top three London executives.[...]
The committee also signed a $41m retention package for Eric Felder, the head of global fixed income in New York, and a $40m two-year deal for Jerry Donini, the US-based head of equities. These are understood to have been voided, replaced by new contracts under Barclays which bought the US business.
The pay deals will further inflame the debate raging about executive pay as the global financial crisis accelerates.
In the two years prior to Lehman’s collapse, the executives were generously remunerated while overseeing forays into risky commercial real-estate investments that helped to bring the company down.
It truly is amazing that this type of behavior isn't criminal. People go to jail for stealing (or attempting to steal) far less than the amount these crooks had hoped to take. More than that, they had already been showered with riches from their risky ventures while they went boom before the inevitable bust. If these executives had any sense of humility or knew what it means to be accountable, they'd have given back the ridiculous amount of money they already had, not take any more.
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