Favours to come
MY READER on an £18-a-month pension from Beecham can think himself lucky that he did not work for Glaxo. There, the pen- sion fund has to carry the burden of looking after Sir Paul Girolami. He has now retired as chairman on a pension which ought to clock up £18 every eight-and-a-half min- utes. To help fund it Glaxo has contributed £696,000 in his last year of service, plus £3,687,000 booked to the previous year, plus another £2,270,000 now he has got his feet up. A gaggle of boardroom grandees who include Lord Kingsdown, sometime Governor of the Bank of England, have blessed these arrangements. Do they think that a salary of £1,489,000 and bonus of £436,000 and options over 519,248 shares were not enough to let Sir Paul provide for his old age? Such committees prefer to drift off into a haze of rose-tinted comparability, where nothing is too good for such irreplace- able chaps as themselves. Sir Paul has been replaced but that does still not stop his col- leagues throwing money at him. They should remember that even in boardrooms, grati- tude is a lively sense of favours to come.
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