ANN CROTTY: Brait’s R2bn corporate capture
Why Brait’s management bailout is particularly galling
A few years ago a leading light at one of our large banks wrote an opinion piece whingeing about people who whinge about executive pay. It was a disappointing piece, not so much because I was probably one of the targets but because its main contention was that criticism of excessive executive pay is motivated by envy. This was such a blindingly predictable statement it didn’t need a highly paid leading light to point it out. Much more disappointing was the absence of any reference to the possibility that, far from being the outcome of an efficient market system, executive pay is indicative of market failure. Failure on such a scale that it could be termed corporate capture. Look at the debris scattered around the corporate landscape — blame the politicians, blame the economy, blame the workers, Eskom, Donald Trump, blame whatever you like — the fact is that executives are being paid for perfection and are delivering less than mediocrity. It’s hard to imagine we’d have been any worse...
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