Many of this site’s most avid readers drive Porsches. They are nippy, reliable and radiate quiet good taste. The Financial Times reports that chief executive Wendelin Wiedeking has lost his job but has had the pill slightly sweetened by a €50 million pay off. The company will be joining Audi, Bugatti and Bentley as part of the Volkswagen group.

Wiedeking is getting the chop because he has run up a debt of €10bn for the firm. Even with my limited grasp of high finance it’s pretty obvious that this is not a clever thing to do. In most jobs you’d be sacked in some sort of capabiity procedure for rather less serious errors of judgement.

€50m might seem pretty generous but last year Wiedeking “earned” €80m. We’ll have no badmouthing of him. He’s said he would spend half the sum on a newly-formed charity for Porsche employees and to support  elderly and suffering journalists. Ahh!

One of the more perceptive comments on the matter came from Johannes Kahrs of the SPD. He said that the severance package was “in no relation to what one can earn in normal jobs”. That German gift for deep thinking leaves the rest of us awestruck sometimes.

The Wall Street Journal cites one deeply weird union official.

“Berthold Huber, president of the IG Metall labor union of engineering workers, told reporters Thursday that Wiedeking would have been entitled to a compensation of up to EUR260 million, based on calculations by Wiedeking’s lawyers. The labor union welcomed the fact that Wiedeking had given up “the major portion of the severance pay to which his contract would have entitled him.”

Berthold is not someone you would want on your team.