It's a school boy excuse to say 'if they do it, then why can't i"...pathetic (read below what the BHP and RIO Ceo's do to travel)
US23mil plus US3.3mil/year might be pennies to you and uncle Kev, but to the rest of us shlepers it would've paid his generous salary for the next 5 years...or paid for half the cost for drilling at PAVO STH off WA(60% chance of success) to prove upto more than 43mil barrels of oil to add to the Dorado development.
Read the original article below and if you can't smell the stench from the deception alone.. (not to mention the costs not being justified) ,then you really must be related.
FROM AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
Article Sept 12 2023
Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher joins the jet set
Joe AstonColumnistSep 12, 2023 – 1.18pm
One person spending a great deal less time in the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge these days is Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher.That’s because in 2022, the oil and gas giant leased a private jet, a 2017 Dassault Falcon (sale price: $US23 million), for use “by the board and executive team to enable more cost- and time-efficient business travel to operations remote from our capital city offices”.Santos CEO Kevin Gallagher was sighted in Edinburgh in March this year, many thousands of kilometres away from the company’s nearest operations. Ben SearcyThat’s not a line in Santos’ full-year accounts, incidentally, it’s a statement from the company after I approached it with evidence – internal budget documents – of $US3.3 million set aside in “corporate jet operating costs” for 2023.“The jet is primarily used for travel to Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Alaska and remote facilities in Australia where we operate,” the statement continued.“Primarily” being the operative word, but we’ll come to that.
The 10-seater aircraft is chartered by other companies – 13 times thus far in 2023 – when Gallagher isn’t using it, generating offset revenue for Santos.Santos’ 2017 Dassault Falcon, for use “by the board and executive team”.
Santos said that Gallagher had flown on commercial airlines this year on 13 occasions, so the great man is still slumming it occasionally.It also said that Gallagher has been accompanied by his family on the Santos jet twice in 2022 and five times in 2023. You can bet your bottom dollar that Gallagher hasn’t taken the missus to remote facilities seven times in the past 15 months.“Family travel did not result in any additional cost to the company as all trips were domestic and business-related,” Santos said.No doubt the company has considered all the fringe benefits tax implications of this perk and shared them with the Australian Taxation Office. It would be nice, though, to see it noted in Gallagher’s remuneration tables in the annual report.After we put it to Santos that the jet had been sighted in Edinburgh in March this year, many thousands of kilometres away from the company’s nearest operations, the company said: “Mr Gallagher travelled to North America and the United Kingdom in March on investor roadshows as he always does at this time of year following the full-year results. Edinburgh is always on the investor roadshow circuit and this year, the timing coincided with a Scotland v Ireland rugby match over the weekend, which the CEO attended as a guest of an energy consultancy and advisory company.”The timing coincided. Primarily. These are the stock phrases of flimsy self-rationalisation.Santos has become an increasingly significant sponsor of Australian rugby over Gallagher’s tenure. Santos Festival of Rugby in Narrabri? We get it, given the company’s divisive project outside the regional NSW town. But a non-consumer natural gas brand on the Wallabies jersey? It’s the strangest commercial deal in professional sport since Hamish Douglass sponsored the Ashes.The use of private jets may be commonplace in American business but remains almost unheard of in corporate Australia, even among the ASX 10 – the rare exception being companies with billionaire proprietors such as Andrew Forrest. Rumour has it the Fortescue jet has a functioning jacuzzi like in the old Cusson’s Imperial Leather commercial. “Simon, Tahiti!”Private aircraft travel isn’t even the done thing at Australia’s two mining giants, BHP and Rio Tinto, despite their operations in far-flung corners of the world. For site visits in Australia, Mike Henry and Jakob Stausholm catch the dodgy old Dash 8 charters into the Pilbara, crammed in beside their FIFO workforces.You might give Santos a little leeway here, given the almost peerless inaccessibility of some of its projects. But how can that possibly explain Gallagher conducting an investor roadshow to the United Kingdom by private jet? That is just peak stupid. The cost of circumnavigating the globe in a Dassault Falcon ranks in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.Even if his first stop was the boondocks of Alaska or PNG, he should’ve taken the jet to Vancouver or Singapore and continued on a scheduled commercial airline service. Instead, Kevin Gallagher is touring the world on the shareholder dime like he’s the long-lost brother of Liam and Noel from Oasis.Can someone urgently check the pulse of Santos chairman Keith Spence? He worked with Gallagher at Woodside 15 years ago and plenty of evidence suggests Spence is now wrapped around Gallagher’s little finger.The chairman allowed his CEO to accept a seat on the board of Mineral Resources early in 2022, though the appointment was abandoned after a shareholder outcry.In 2021, mysterious rumours reached Spence that Woodside was seeking to poach Gallagher (this was news to the Woodside board) and so Gallagher was granted a $6 million equity incentive payment to keep him at Santos. Not that he was going anywhere.In return for Gallagher staying, did Spence agree to be an even more indulgent chairman than Woodside’s Richard Goyder?There’s got to be a good chance Gallagher will need to meet French investors during the week of the Rugby World Cup final next month. Coincidentally, of course. If track form is anything to go by, he won’t be travelling on a Qantas ticket. And if Spence plays his cards right, he could even score a seat on the company bus.
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