Not a bad bonus for losing so much money.
As he's French one wonders if he was a mole all along.
The man who piloted BT's Global Services division into a cliff and ensured the wider group made losses that prompted thousands of job cuts trousered £2.85m for his efforts, investors were told today. Francois Barrault last year received a £1.6m termination package, along with hundreds of thousands for school fees, housing and …
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..
Well that's what the Board call it. I think fraud might be quite a good description as well. But of course IANL.
I wonder what the majority shareholders (that would be assorted share investment funds) have to say. Not much I should imagine. They don't really think of themselves as owners
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.