Old Mutual’s “replacement” remuneration policy has a bit of all the things that make executive remuneration such a flawed, self-serving process. It also contains many of the reasons why 21st-century shareholder capitalism has destroyed so much value and made the problem of inequality so much worse.The story of executive pay at Old Mutual has been about paying each executive team as though it were in the top 10% of executive performers, and then paying it extra for undoing the damage done by the previous highly paid team.The new remuneration policy designed to deal with the “unique” circumstances around Bruce Hemphill’s leadership takes this story to its logical and totally insane conclusion.Essentially it’s about giving Hemphill a large fortune for undoing much of the work of his predecessors and getting the company back to where a lot of people think it should have been a decade or more ago (but wasn’t because of previous “executive talent“). It’s a bit like paying kidnappers to ge...
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