How much will Wallis and Batchelor Collect?

Here is Crikey's take on the likely pay-outs for the two main men. They always talk in millions these days - it's almost sickening.

. AMP DOES THE RIGHT THING

Congratulations to the AMP board for doing the right yesterday. The market
had clearly lost faith in the company's leadership and we were a little
surprised the stock price did not recover somewhat with CEO Paul Batchelor
copping the bullet and chairman Stan Wallis flagging his departure before
next year's AGM.

Then again, with the FTSE 100 crashing through 3700 points last night, the
UK black hole just gets bigger and bigger for AMP.

Crikey is tipping Batch will collect a final year payout of about $6
million - half the $12.2 million that George Trumbull collected in his
final year.

But Stan Wallis is well placed to collect almost double what Ian Burgess
got when he was turfed out as AMP chairman in 1999.

You see, Stan is the highest paid non-executive chairman in the country
taking a handy $425,000 a year from AMP. Given that the venerable fund
manager has a generous retirement scheme that sees directors walking out
with a lump sum equivalent to up to 5 years of their fees, Stan could
become the first retiring non-executive chairman in Australia to crack a
$2 million payout. He's just got to beat the $1.74 million that Mark
Rayner got from NAB and he'll be top of the pops. Since joining the board
in 1990, Stan will have collected almost $4 million from AMP. And what a
stellar 12 years they have been. AMP has gone from being Australia's
biggest investor to number three or four. It has also gone from having $5
billion in excess capital when it floated to being about $1 billion
undercapitalised.

As for Paul Batchelor, it really is a lesson in skeletons. Anyone who was
Russell Goward's operations director at Westmex, a company that dived in
1989 partly because AMP dumped the stock, should not have risen to such an
exalted position.

Peter Smedley, his former boss at Colonial, describes him as follows: "As
a CEO he makes a good CFO."

Not that Smedley is any great shakes these days, despite pocketing more
than $20 million by selling Colonial to the Commonweatlh Bank. Another
great Smedleyism is this line: "You only get one David Murray in your life
and I've had mine."


Regards