The Flying, Golfing CEO

In May I wrote about air travel perks of corporate CEOs. Apparently, golfing is one of the uses CEOs make of their private - oops, company - planes. No less than the capitalist press (aka The Wall Street Journal) has a lengthy article about this practice.

The article names about ten CEO/golfers and has made good use of the web to correlate golf scores (courtesy of the USGA) with flight records (from aviation-data services). Most of these companies argue that their security policy demands that the CEO always fly in private planes, the board has approved the flights and SEC rules are followed. Well, I wonder who sets these security policies and appoints the board? Usually the golfing CEO. And the SEC rules are a joke. On a flight that costs about $25k the CEO may pay a couple of hundred bucks more in income tax.

Here are some typical examples of misusing the shareholders' money:

• The Alltel jet has landed 165 times over the last four years at Augusta, GA, where the chairman and his son are members of the golf club there. They golf about four of every five weekends.
• The chairman of Motorola, based in Illinois, has traveled at least once a month this year to his house on a golf course in Carmel, CA. A consulting firm estimates that each flight costs more than $46,000.
• The National City Bank jet transported its chairman here to the Vineyard Golf Club nine times during the nine weeks that made up July and August this year.
• The head of Cintas wrote in a book given to employees, "We have a Spartan attitude about our business. We are not concerned with the frills of expensive restaurants, fancy offices or luxurious accommodation." This guy is worth $1.4 billion, yet in seven months (November 2004 - May 2005) he managed to have his company plane bring him to the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo 24 times; that's almost once a week.