Business types running rings round Whitehalls politico's & mandarins ?
In the article you wrote:
"Three other executives are specifically named by the NAO: Graham Love, Hal Kruth and Brenda Jones, who made £20m, £13m and £11m respectively."
These three joined QinetiQ in 2001. Would it be unfair to assume that the civil service types they replaced might have been uncomfortable with setting themselves up for such a gargantuan windfall ?
Their leader, Sir John Chisholm, also has a business background, and was brought in by the MoD in 1991 to consolidate their research organisations, and ended up running the lot.
Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Lord Gilbert said that Chisholm had misled him with regard to the possible benefits accruing to senior management following the privatisation. At the time Lord Gilbert was the minister at the MoD responsible for this matter. He presumably remains a relatively poor man.
These were the relative returns on investment:
Top ten - 200 fold growth (4.0 % of the shares)
Next 245 managers - 145 fold growth (3.1 % of the shares)
Staff 8000+? - 9 fold growth (3.4 % of the shares)
Why was it deemed reasonable that the top ten managers needed to be "Incentivised" at over twenty times the rate of incentivising the staff? In the outside corporate world, when staff, management and directors are awarded share incentives, they are usually at the same price discount at any one time, and the relative importance of the people being rewarded is accounted for in the number of shares made available to them. However in this case, QinetiQ's top management awarded themselves shares in large quantites, which would possibly be fair enough, but then they really gilded the lily by charging themselves less than a twentieth the price per share that the rank and file had to pay !!! A moral crime of the first order.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
