Edward Russell-Walling

America was treated to a peep at the CEO’s expense account recently, to discover, among other things, that the boss of American Express was paid $132,000 for personal use of company cars and reimbursed for snacks from the company dining room. Some people were more upset by the snacks than by the car. More of this kind of information is being made public because the US Securities & Exchange Commission has lowered the threshold for disclosure of perks. But executive pay and disclosure are only two of the management activities subject to the stern eye of ‘corporate governance’, which has an increasingly powerful influence on the way companies behave.