Time to pay the fiddlers

As posts last week canvased, there has been much ado about Telstra of late ("late" including at least the last couple of years). With all of its mad dashes to Asian techwreck, to content and media broadbasing (including a study of buying out the Fairfax print media group), to outsourcing the management to America and the support staff to India, to just making a hash of the privatisation grail, you have to wonder if the board members have been heads up or down through all this. Have they actually created and directed policy or have they rubber stamped it?

Well, whether thay have just been fiddling around or not, the board has decided they're due for a pay rise. They didn't so much as say so as whisper it, after the market closed for the week last Friday night, with the smoke still thick from the battle field encounter between the Howard executive and the Trujillo executive to cover their tracks.

"This would take the maximum total directors' fees to $2 million, up 52 per cent... Telstra defended the controversial increase, saying that a directors' fee pool of $2 million "compares favourably with the fee pools of Australian companies of comparable size"." http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/telstra-board-reckons-its-about-time-for-a-pay-rise/2005/09/09/1125772692735.html I thought, when it came time to review pay packets, that performance was the prime criteria. Silly me. On this thought in history, see http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/08/eye-of-beholder.html.