As he's French one wonders if he was a mole all along.

At half the salary and a mere percentage of the bonus!

They could have known this from the start, really.

C&W has a history of pulling in people with insane packages, and, credibility so established, let's them loose on other businesses to cause them even more damage than they caused C&W. Remember Richard "Dick" Brown? He came for cost cutting, but had a mild problem discovering where the fat ended and meat (and sometimes even bones) started.

After that debacle he was let loose on a new company which thankfully got rid of him PDQ.

It appears BT wasn't that smart. Q: if the profits were, well, made up, wouldn't that be the breach of contract that could lead to substantial adjustments in the payments? Nice competitive move from C&W, I'd say..

Another Q: where is Clouseau moving to? Worth avoiding that company, methinks.

And C&W. And BT..

But I'm free next year, and will do it for £500,000 plus expenses.

Barrault deserves no defence but he didn't come from C&W. Other BT execs did, but not him. His tenure was farcical, and his pay off is outrageous (ps how many air miles did his year of exotic jaunts earn?) but he was so far removed from the business that he couldn't have made such a mess that fast.... look further back to the machismo culture that pursued top line revenue growth as if that was the hard part.

It is time that executives, in addition to bonuses for doing well, had a "malus" clause in their contracts so that, if they do badly, they have to repay some or all of their salaries and income.

Shareholders should be pushing for maluses when approving bonus systems.