next ceo should get no options

The current CEO took over when the shares were at $8 and over the course of his tenure lost 70% of their value. Like many CEO's he held few or no shares but was awarded many tens of thousand valuable options under the pretext of "aligning management and shareholders interests". Well it certainly does not appear to have worked that way with shareholders suffering huge losses and the CEO still getting paid lots of money.

Now when the next CEO comes in, they will likely use some "big bath" accounting - writing down assets to make future earnings look better. Of course, coincidently and luckily for them, this will drive down the share price and thus the strike price at which the options portion of their remuneration is set. Given this and the experience with the current CEO perhaps the board should consider using shares rather than options in the remuneration package. That way when shareholders suffer, the CEO suffers and when shareholders do well, the CEO does well - much better alignment of interests.

And while the board are at it they should also read the Continuous Disclosure Obligations, to wit:

3.1 Once an entity is or becomes aware of any information concerning it that a reasonable person would expect to have a material effect on the price or value of the entity’s securities, the entity must immediately tell ASX that information.

Now either it is just a huge coincidence that their has been a large amount of selling leading up to bad news being released or there has been selective briefing going on. I find it very hard to believe that the CEO resigned and there is nothing more to disclose. For example just look at the share price movement in days/weeks before the "Trading Update" on 20/5/13. All shareholders deserve to be told the facts at the same time, not a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to your mates that things aren't looking good and then publicly releasing the information a couple of months later when they have sold out.