Dany Bahar Fired Effective Immediately
Dany Bahar has been dismissed effective immediately by Group Lotus following an investigation into Bahar’s spending practices.
Bahar was under scrutiny for charging home renovations and private aircraft to the company while Lotus was in the red and behind on its loan payments. Of course, excess spending in the corporate world is nothing new, but when you’ve overstayed your welcome, it’s a great way to get yourself canned.
The tragedy is that Bahar’s vision, while ruthlessly mocked, was fairly sound, even if he exhibited questionable conduct as an individual. Lotus needs to appeal to more than just the hairshirt types who buy the Elise and Exige, and their new cars are being well received by the UK media (we won’t be getting the wild Exige S V6 unfortunately). Hopefully DRB-Hicom has someone waiting in the wings that can execute a long-term strategy for Lotus.
More by Derek Kreindler
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But he got a plane and a bigger house, isn't that kaizen enough?
Hey man. As great as his vision was, it wasn't his vision that got him fired.
Derek - If I can ask, what is your corporate experience? This isnt "excess spending", its inappropriate spending. Contrary to what you might believe, and what a few rogue companys/execs have done, Its not commonplace in 2012 to be charging home expansions to company **without Comp Committee approval** and appropriate taxes on those benefits. If an exec wants to spend 300 bucks on a bottle of wine while on a dinner for corporate purpopse, that might be excessive spending, but does happen a lot. If he spends 300 bucks on a hooker, falsifies receipts and charges it to the company, thats not common, and will often lead to dismissal. Agree that a warning and a trip to sex addict therapy is possible. But there is a distinction is between what many would see as "excess", and fraud. Charging home improvements wouldn't be appropriate at Apple, a company with a multi billion dollar cash hoard. Lotus's shitty cash position is not really relevant.
Fired but with how big an exit pkg? second question, why so long? Watch the teflon don pop his slimy head up somewhere else quite soon and create more havoc. 10 bucks says he is going to be in finance in Europe next. Lotus as a whole should be divested from the parent and sold to a group that can make something of it- slowly. Make 1 model well. Drop the elise and exige if they don't make money- they will be sooner or later with that EU idiot pedestrian guidelines. Spin off the car division to a kit car manufacturer. Keep the suspension IP. I don't see the elise competing with boxster for the same money not now with the 2012 one- besides they only sell like 16k boxsters a yr, so $1b segment- for a car manufacturer that's like nothing. Ideally I would like to see mazda pick em up. mx-5 + elise + mazda 3 turbo engine= sweet bliss. But mazda is doing pretty badly right now- too much overhead and BS corporate stuff like owning a baseball team. Or skoda could pick them up and integrate into their rally cars. Skoda Fabia S2000 with lotus suspension, something like that. Or any of the Detroit idiots- god knows all of their cars need handling Corvette with lotus handling? Would certainly make my impending mid life crisis more palatable.