What would happen to you if you were to perform abysmally at work? What if the affects of your lack of oversight, ill judgement or poor management had cost your company dearly? Let’s say your company recorded a loss in the last financial year of £24.1 billion, the biggest loss in UK corporate history, you’d expect to lose your job, right?
Now, that’s a colossal amount of money to lose. Your company should have gone under. But no, because it’s total & catastrophic failure might have had huge repercussions for the entire British banking industry, your company has not been allowed to completely disappear off the face of the earth. Instead, the British taxpaying public has been forced to throw the money for their roads, street cleaning, schools, hospitals etc into propping up your company.
Last year Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS took home £4m. Then when the bank near collapsed he resigned. The British taxpayer bailed out his godforsaken bank to the tune of billions of pounds, billions of hard-earned pounds, a contribution from every one of the 60 million plus people in Great Britain, some of whom after paying their taxes struggled to make ends meet and now some of those people are out of work.
But Sir Fred Goodwin is out of work now too, and he believes he is entitled, at the age of 50, to his £16million pension pot which will earn him £693,000 a year for life. He will earn more in one year than I could earn in all the remaining years of my working life.
And why is he called SIR Fred Goodwin? Because of his “services to banking” he was knighted in 2004.
For his disservices to banking he should have that title stripped away. For losing billions and costing the taxpayer he should have his assets frozen. For being a greedy bastard he should have his pension stopped. There’s a real mob out there who would rather go ’round his house and drag him out for a kangaroo court – I’d redistribute his wealth to the country seeing as that’s where it was stolen from in the first place.
So the price of failure is retaining your knighthood, hanging on to your spoils of war, your Ferraris and your golf, and stealing over half a million every year for the rest of your life.
I wish I was a failure.
20090317: There’s a petition to revoke Fred Goodwin’s knighthood.
5 users commented in " The Price of Failure "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackSadly, I feel like this scumbag stories have become too common across the world, of late…with one nice recent exception…
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerindex?id=6977670
XO
That’s an excellent foil to the story of *sir* Fred Goodwin, thank you. Leonard Abbas of City National Bank is truly the nicest guy in the history of banking and a beacon of Corporate Social Responsibility. The world needs more people like Leonard Abbas – Whilst he shares a $60million bonus with 399 current and 72 previous employees, you have Fred Goodwin rewarding his own failure with a (nearly) $1million a year pension until he dies. Definitely a tale of good & evil.
Seems like most head honchos in high positions seem to follow the same pedigree of huge egos, very selfish, and costing their companies millions. Has been happening a lot here in the States recently.
I totally agree Craig. Then there’s their sheer arrogance at their unquestionable entitlement and the utter contempt with which they treat Joe public.
Sir Fred Goodwin currently holds the (un)popular public titles of the World’s Worst Banker and Britain’s Most Hated Man but then for half a million pounds a year I’m sure he could live with that.
As for stripping Sir Fred of his knighthood, that might be the move that really dents his conscience to the strength of public outrage.
[...] Goodwin, ex boss of the Royal bank of Scotland, who received a huge pension of £693,000 a year despite being responsible for the biggest ever loss in British corporate [...]
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