IS SMRT’S MILLION DOLLAR CEO DESMOND KUEK WORTH HIS SALT?

Desmond Kuek earned over S$1 million in his first 6 months as CEO of SMRT, according to SMRT’s annual report for 2013. That’s from the period of October 2012 to March 2013.

Let’s take a look at the breakdown of this (we’ll move on to the SMRT breakdowns in just a bit). Mr Kuek received a basic salary of S$305,000 for 6 months on the job. In addition to this, he was paid a performance bonus of S$274,000. And in even more addition to this, he was given S$32,000 in ‘benefits’.

That’s a neat sum of S$611,000. But that’s not all.

Mr Kuek was given 156,000 shares on a Restricted Shares Plan, and another 130,000 on a performance share plan. If you go by today’s trading price of SMRT shares (S$1.59), his shares would be worth almost S$445,000.

Well, that’ll make it more than a million in total, wouldn’t it? The question is whether Mr Kuek deserves this sum of money. After all, he’s heading Singapore’s top transport firm.

Taking into account a couple of months of seat-warming time, let’s take a look at this nice little chart documenting SMRT’s lapses from Jan 2013 to Jun 2013.

You be the judge:

Red Wire Times