HENRY DEEDES
watches travel firm executives squirm
Arnie’s double feels the pain . . .
WHen the dust settles on the Thomas Cook fiasco the boss of the collapsed firm will inevitably explore new employment opportunities. I’m no career adviser but he could do worse than offer himself as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stunt double.
Swiss-born Peter Fankhauser is a ringer for the Austrian beefcake. The build, the bog-brush haircut. even his Teutonic ‘I’ll be Bach’ monotone makes him sound like The Terminator. Herr Fankhauser was up before the business committee yesterday. It was painful viewing at times. As performances go, he made wooden old Arnie look like that great thespian Ralph Richardson.
Alongside him was chairman Frank Meysman, with a neck-tie arranged in one of those fat Windsor knots last fashionable in the 1970s. Also in attendance: fellow directors Sten Daugaard, Martine Verluyten and Warren Tucker. For two and a half hours they were grilled. none of this galère emerged with any credit.
‘Tank you for dis opportunity to say how deeply sorry vee are,’ Fankhauser remarked upon opening, suitably humbled and hairshirted. His words might have rung a little less hollow had he not rolled in sporting what looked suspiciously like an autumn suntan. Behind him sat a number of ashenfaced Thomas Cook customers who’ve been left out of pocket, as well as several of the firm’s employees. Delightfully, they’d turned up in their company uniforms.
Top of the committee’s agenda was the remuneration that Fankhauser and his directors received during his five years in charge, in particular the £20million they snaffled in bonuses. We learned Fankhauser received an extra £750,000 in 2017. Committee chairman Rachel Reeves (Lab, Leeds West) asked how much of that he intended to hand back to help with redundancy payments. ‘Honestly, chair, I wasn’t thinking of that,’ he sighed. I bet he wasn’t!
Tuba-voiced Reeves had clearly eaten her oats that morning. While unlikely to be troubling the after-dinner speaking circuit, she’s a smart cookie. She gave Brusselsborn Meysman a proper going-over.
So often it’s the businesses’ chairmen, those cheery, hands- off creatures, whose main duty is invariably turning up to present the trophy at company golf day, who end up looking clueless in these situations. Sure enough, the Belgian was no different. ‘What is the position of Thomas Cook now? Reeves asked him. ‘It no longer exists,’ Meysman replied.
‘And why is that?’ she probed. ‘That’s a good question,’ he pondered.
At that moment, I’m fairly sure I could hear the meaty thwack of his media adviser’s palm against his own forehead.
Reeves’ summing-up was a rip- snorter. The sort of rollicking designed to shame.
The failure of Thomas Cook, she declared, was down to their misjudgments while earning salaries higher than their employees could expect to earn in a lifetime.
She asked them to reflect on the dignity the employees had shown so lacking in themselves. As words gently echoed around the committee room, the executives sat gormlessly for several moments, their glares frozen like five gargoyles staring back from the guttering.