Ian Thompson wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2023 12:09 pm
That misses part of the point. Part of the NEDs' role is to scrutinise what the Board is doing and raise any issues they find. The question is whether Sarah would raise issues with the Board if they related to the FD when the FD is her husband.
A case in point might be the concerns raised by the chair of the Finance Committee, who reported in April that "The total (Chennai Olympiad) costs were over budget by a considerable amount, even allowing for the fact that the move to India caused a significant increase in travelling costs".
The management accounts presented in April showed Olympiad costs of £69,533 as against budget of £43,000. In updating his report for the AGM, the FC chair added "There were also expenses associated with visas, to which I can personally attest. However, the overwhelming issue was air fares, coming in at close to £30k. We were shown individual amounts paid and in my judgement these range from moderately high to extraordinarily high. I do not know how these tickets were sourced ...". He pointed out that, having gone to Chennai himself at his own cost, he was probably better-placed than most to comment on what were reasonable travel costs.
I can appreciate that it may be irritating to the executive directors to have issues raised, whether by independent committees or by NEDs, and I appreciate that I'm not necessarily going to be the flavour of the month by raising this, but they're there for a reason. I do not suggest that anything improper, akin to the Keene/Miles saga 40 years ago, happened but it's a fact of life that most people are rather less careful with other people's money than they are with their own. I can see there's a difficulty revealing personal information but, nevertheless, If the FC chair can't get to the bottom of this - and one can only speculate what he meant by "extraordinarily high" - then I'd suggest the NEDs should be asking questions.